
Class . 

Book 

GopyrigMN^. 



CQFmiGHT DEPOSm 



TERRIBLY INTIMATE PORTRAITS 



Terribly 
Intimate Portraits 



COMPILED BY 

NOEL COWARD 



WITH SIXTEEN 
REPRODUCTIONS FROM OLD MASTERS BY 

LORN MACNAUGHTAN 




BONI AND LIVERIGHT 

Publishers : New York 











6 



^^Ve^*^ 



TERRIBLY INTIMATE PORTRAITS 
Copyright, 1922, by 

BONI & LlVERIGHT, InC. 

Printed in the United States of America 



M -S (922 
©GI.A674521 



GLADYS BARBER 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

IN view of the fact that I have received many 
tiresome and even carping letters from the 
more captious critics of this child of my brain, I 
feel in justice to myself and Miss Macnaughtan 
that it is incumbent upon me to protest, in no 
measured terms, against what is not only an or- 
ganised opposition and a pusillanimous display of 
superficial egotism, but a dirty trick. 

I have been taunted with my inaccuracies; I 
have been called a fool; an idiot; an uneducated 
dolt; and an illiterate cow! This is far from kind, 
and I resent it. 

My concentrated researches prove these memoirs 
to be absolutely accurate in every historical detail. 

I refute utterly these criticisms, fostered by 
naught but the basest jealousy. 



8 Author s Note 

My parents and other relatives consider the book 
excellent. 

NOEL COWARD. 

"The Hoi,ues," 

Marine Crescent, 
Rome. 



FOREWORD 

1HAVE endeavoured in writing and compiling this 
book, to emphasize not only actual deeds and his- 
torical facts, but to aspire to an even higher goal — to 
conjure to life for a few brief moments the " Souls " 
of my subjects, stark in all their deathless beauty. 
What task could be nobler than to delve in these vivid 
famous lives and bring to light, perhaps, some hitherto 
undiscovered motive — some delicate and radiant action 
which so far has escaped the common historian and lain 
unplucked like a wee wood violet in an old, old garden ! 
Modern realists would have us believe that romance 
and beauty are dead, that the spirit of heroic achieve- 
ment and chivalry has been crushed by the jugger- 
nautic wheels of civilisation. Poor blind, sad-hearted 
fools — their dreary, unlovely minds have risen like 
gaunt weeds from the ashes of their wasted opportuni- 
ties. Romance dead? Never! And in order to dis- 

9 



lo Foreword 

prove their dismal forebodings, I have included in my 
portrait gallery studies of such national heroes as — 
Snurge, Spout, PufFwater and Plinge. Men selected 
purposely not merely for the glory of their achieve- 
ments but for the individual dissimilarity of their 
fundamental characteristics, and to illustrate to doubt- 
ing minds the amazing resemblance between the signal 
courage and romanticism of our forebears, and the 
innate present day spirit of high endeavour. 

Take for example " Madcap Moll," Eighth Duchess 
of Wapping, and her famous ride to Norwich — and 
compare it with Jabez Puffwater's ride to the succour 
of his old Aunt Topsy. Or E. Maxwell Snurge's 
celebrated national appeal in West Forty-Second street, 
and Sarah, Lady Tunnell-Penge's dramatic speech 
from Tower Hill to the turbulent people of London. 

All, all are impregnated through and through with 
the never failing spirit of public heroism, and staunch 
loyalty to existing standards, and all will stand for 
beauty, romance, and nobility of purpose until the 
end of time. 



Foreword ii 

Ring up the curtain. Bring to life the faded tap- 
estries of yesterday side by side with the vivid multi- 
coloured bas-reliefs of to-day ! The frou-frou of 
brocade and lavender adown bygone corridors, and the 
sharp toned clarion call of Twentieth Century heroism 
and daring-do ! 

NOEL COWARD 

" The Hollies," 
Marine Crescent, 
Rome, 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Foreword 9 

1. My American Diary 17 

2. Julie de Poopinac 29 

3. Madcap Moll, Eighth Duchess of Wapping . . 41 

4. E, Maxwell Snurge, An Intimate Study ... 53 

5. BlANCA DI PiANNO-FoRTI 63 

6. Sarah, Lady Tunnell-Penge (" Winsome Sal") . 75 

7. Jabez Puffwater 89 

8. FURSTESr LlEBERWURST ZU SCHWEINEN-KaLBER . . 100 

9. Jake D'Annunzio Spout iii 

10. Donna Isabella Angela Y Bananas 125 

11. Maggie MacWhistle 135 

12. The Education of Rupert Plinge 147 

13. Anna Podd 161 

14. Sophie, the Uncrowned Queen of Henry VIII . 171 

1$. "La Bibi" 181 

16. Ah! Ah!, Queen of the Rude Islands 193 

Glossary 203 

Press Notices 211 



"MY AMERICAN DIARY '^ 




NOEL COWARD 
Author of "M^ American Diary ' 



Terribly Intimate Portraits 

I 

" MY AMERICAN DIARY'? 

SATURDAY 

I FELT that some sort of scene was necessary in 
order to celebrate my first entrance into America, 
so I said " Little lamb, who made thee? " to a customs 
official. A fracas ensued far exceeding my wildest 
dreams, during which he delved down — with malice 
aforethought — to the bottom of my trunk and dis- 
covered the oddest things in my sponge bag. I think 
Pm going to like America. 

I have very good letters to Daniel Blood, Dolores 
Hoofer, Senator Pinchbeck, Violet Curzon-Meyer, and 
Julia Pescod, so I ought to get along all right socially 
at any rate. 

17 



1 8 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

It would be quite impossible to give an adequate 
description of one's first glimpse of Broadway at night 
— I should like to have a little pocket memory of it 
to take out and look at whenever I feel depressed. I 
shall feel awfully offended for Piccadilly Circus when 
I get back. 

God! How I love frosted chocolate! 

WEDNESDAY 

For a really jolly evening, recommend me to the 
Times Square subway station. You get into any train 
with that delicious sensation of breathless uncertainty 
as to where exactly you are going to be conveyed. To 
approach an official is sheer folly, as any tentative ques- 
tion is quickly calculated to work him up into a frenzy 
of rage and violence, while to ask your fellow passen^ 
gers is equally useless as they are generally as dazed 
as you are. The great thing is to keep calm and at all 
costs avoid expresses. 

As another means of locomotion the Elevated pos- 
sesses a rugged charm which is all its own, the serene 



NLy Afnencan Diary 19 

pleasure of gazing into frowsy bedroom windows at 
elderly coloured ladies in bust bodices and flannel petti- 
coats, being only equalled by the sudden thrill you 
experience when the two front carriages hurtle down 
into the street in flames. 

I took three of my plays to Fred Latham at the 
Globe Theatre. He didn't accept them for immediate 
production, but he told me of two delightful bus rides, 
(ycvt going up Riverside Drive, and the other coming 
down Riverside Drive. I was very grateful as the 
busses, though slow moving, are more or less tranquil 
and filled with the wittiest advertisements — especially 
the little notices about official civility, which made 
everyone rock with laughter. 

FRIDAY 

Met Alexander Woollcott and Heywood Broun at 
a first night — we were roguish together for hours — 
Alexander Woollcott says that each new play is a fresh 
joy to him, but the question is whether he's a fresh 
joy ta each new play! — I wonder. 



20 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

TUESDAY 

Spent all last night at Coney Island — I've never 
known such an atmosphere of genuine carnival. We 
went on " The Whip," the sudden convulsions of which 
drove the metal clasp of my braces sharply into my 
back, I think scarring me for life. Then we went into 
" The Haunted House " where a board gave way be- 
neath my feet and ricked my ankle, the " Giant Dip- 
per " was comparatively tame as I only bruised my side 
and cut my cheek. After this we had " hot dog " 
and stout, which the others seemed to enjoy immensely, 
then — laughing gaily — we all ran through a re- 
volving wooden wheel, at least the others did, I inad- 
vertently caught my foot and fell, which caused a lot 
of amusement. I shall not go out again with a sharp 
edged cigarette case in my pocket. 

THURSDAY 

Went down to Chinatown with a jolly party all in 
deep evening dress which I thought was rather inap- 



NLy American Diary 2i 

propriate. Mrs. Vernon Bale dropped ner side comb 
into the chop suey which occasioned much laughter — 
Jeffery was very tiresome and refused to be impressed, 
saying repeatedly that he'd seen it all before in 
"Aladdin! " 

We all went to " Montmartre " afterwards. Ina 
Claire was there looking lovely as usual. Marie Prune 
was sitting at the next table squinting dreadfully and, 
I think, rather drunk and obviously upset about her 
sister running away with a Chinaman — poor dear, 
she's had a lot of trouble but still even that's no excuse 
for looking like a blanc mange slipping off the dish, 
she should cultivate a little more vitality and never 
wear pink. 

MONDAY 

Just back from a week-end at Southampton with Mrs. 
Vernon Bale. Apart from coming down to breakfast 
she's a perfect hostess. We played the most peculiar 
games on Sunday evening and she and Florrie Wick 



22 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

did a Nautch dance which was rnost entertaining and 
bizarre! How hospitable Americans are, I've fixed up 
heaps of luncheon engagements for next week — 
Edgar Peopthatch was particularly kind — he offered 
to introduce me to Carl Van Vechten and Sophie 
Tucker both of whom I've been longing to meet. 

THURSDAY 

Such a busy day! Had plays refused by Edgar 
Selwyn and William Harris, and this book turned down 
by Scribner's. I also fell off a bus, being unused to 
getting out on the right-hand side. I just love America. 

SUNDAY 

Went with Lester to hear Tom Burke sing at the 
Hippodrome. His voice is better than it's ever been 
and he sang exceedingly good stuff. Poor John 
MacCormack with his winsome Irish ballads. 



My American Diary 23 

TUESDAY 

Lunched at the Coffee House — what an atmosphere 
— even the veal and ham pie tasted of the best Ameri- 
can literature, and there was a lovely signed photograph 
of Hugh Walpole. I do hope I shall be taken again. 

The " Vanity Fair " offices impressed me a lot, 
they're so comfortable, artistic, and full of deathless en- 
deavour. They took the proofs of this book in order 
to publish one or two extracts from it and sent it back 
full of the loveliest corrections. I was duly grateful 
as Mr. Bishop had told me a lot about burlesque dur- 
ing the afternoon. 

WEDNESDAY 

Lynn Fontanne took me to tea at Neysa McMein's 
studio which was most attractive, she is a charming 
hostess and there was an air of pleasing bohemianism 
about the whole affair which went far towards making 
me take another cake — in more formal surroundings 
I should naturally have refrained. After tea I played 



24 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

and sang and everybody talked. It was all great fun. 
I liked F. P. A. enormously, he really ought to write 
for the papers. 

SATURDAY 

If I had money I should buy the English rights of 
" Dulcy " and drag Lynn back to England by sheer 
force — we have few enough good actresses without 
letting those we have, fly away. There's no denying 
that America's the place to get on — this book was 
refused by Harcourt Brace only yesterday. 

Met the Theatre Guild this morning and played hide 
and seek with them in the park — such a merry set of 
rascals! Teresa Helburn invented a new prank — she 
took all my MSS. and hid them in a tin box for two 
months — how we laughed! 

THURSDAY 

Apparently all the theatrical " filite " congregate at 
the Algonquin for supper, I noticed Elsie and Mrs. 



My American Diary 25 

Janis, Irving Berlin, Frances Carson, and Desiree 
Bibble who looked appalling in probably the rudest hat 
that has ever been worn by man, woman, or child. 

Marc Connelly made me laugh for twenty minutes 
over a friend's funeral — what a sense of humour! 



TUESDAY 

Spent all day on an island in the middle of the 
Sound with a lot of old gentlemen in towels — 
returned very sunburned and in great pain — now I 
know what Jeffery suffered when he embarked for 
England looking like a fire engine. 

Went to the first night of " Bluebeard's Eighth 
Wife " with Alfred Lunt — in which Barry Baxter 
made an enormous hit, he is now a brilliant light come- 
dian. I think one or two of his sworn acquaintances in 
England will be quite cross when I tell them. 



26 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

SATURDAY 

Had my first experience of surf bathing to-day, at 
Easthampton. Apart from spraining my wrist, being 
grazed all over, stunned by a breaker, and finally swept 
several miles out to sea, I enjoyed it thoroughly. 

MONDAY 

Met Mr. Liveright — what a dear! 



JULIE DE POOPINAG 




JULIE DE POOPINAC 

Trom a Miniature 



JULIE DE POOPINAC 

FOR several years all France rang with the name 
of Julie de Poopinac — or to give her her full 
title, Angelique Yvonne Mathilde Clementine Virginie 
Celeste Julie, Vicomtesse de Poopinac. As the most 
peerless of all the beauties at Court during the last 
years of a desperately tottering throne, she has been 
hailed and heralded (and is still in some outlying 
villages in Old Provence and Old Normandy) as 
almost an enchantress, so great was her beauty and 
her wit. Born in a stately chateau in Old Picardy, 
she was brought up in comparative seclusion j her 
father, the Due de Potache,^ spent his time at Court, 
so that her radiant loveliness was left to mature and 
develop unnoticed. Her childhood was uneventful, 
but at the age of seventeen this ravishing creature was 

* Famous for being the means of introducing hornless cattle 
into the Gironde. 

29 



30 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

wedded by proxy to Gustave de Poopinac, a dashing 
young officer in the Garde du Corps/ and at twenty- 
five she came to Court in order to see her husband j 
but alas! Fate, seated securely in Destiny's irreproach- 
able turret, willed it that her journey should be in vain. 
She left Old Picardy a merry, laughing married woman 
— and arrived at Versailles a widow. Gustave, the 
husband whose love she would never know, perished 
at an early hour on the morning of her arrival, at an 
adversary's sword-point behind a potting-shed near the 
Petit Trianon. Rumour whispered that it was on ac- 
count of a woman that he fought and lost, but this 
last blow of Providence's hatchet was spared his girl 
bride, innocent, secure in her supreme purity and innate 
virginity. If evil tongues had even mentioned the 
word " woman " to her, she would not have known 
what they meant. 

Gradually the pain of her loss grew less. She 
commenced to enter into Court life with a certain 

^ Nicholas Ben-Hepple declares that he married her solely on 
account of her " dot " ! 



Julie de Poopinac 31 

iamount of zest. Ben-Hepple tells us that it was dur- 
ing a masked carnival in the Park of Versailles that 
she first attracted the attention of the amorous King. 
He had dropped behind Du Barry for a moment to 
tie up his bootlace, and Julie, running girlishly along 
the moonlit path, bumped violently into his arched 
back. With a muttered exclamation he straightened 
himself and tore off her mask. Ben-Hepple goes on 
to say that his Majesty went from scarlet to white, 
from white to green, and then back again to scarlet 
before he made his world-famed remark, " Mon Dieu! 
Quel visage! " At this moment Du Barry appeared, 
furious at being left, and dragged her royal paramour 
away. But the mischief was done. The wheel of cir- 
cumstance had turned once more — and a few days 
later Julie changed her appartements for some on a 
higher landing. 

What vice! What intrigue! What corruption! 
Versailles seemed but a vast conservatory sheltering 
the vile soil from which sprang the lilies of France — 
La Belle France, as Edgar Sheepmeadow so eloquently 



32 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

puts it. Did any single bloom escape the blight of 
ineffable depravity? No — not one! Occasionally 
some fresh young thing would appear at Court — 
appealing and innocent. Then the atmosphere would 
begin to take effect : some one would whisper something 
to her — she would leer almost unconsciously j a few 
days later she would be discovered carrying on anyhow! 

Julie de Poopinac, beautiful, accomplished and 
incredibly witty, queened it in this melee of appalling 
degeneracy J she was not at heart wicked, but her envi- 
ronment closed in upon her pinched and wasted heart, 
crushing the youth and sweetness from it. 

She held between her slim fingers the reins of gov- 
ernment, and womanlike she twisted them this way and 
that, her foolish head slightly turned by adulation and 
flattery. Louis adored her: he gave her a cameo brooch, 
a beaded footstool (which his mother had used), and 
the loveliest cock linnet, which used to fly about all 
over the place, singing songs of its own composition. 

All the world knows of her celebrated scene with 
Marie Antoinette, but Edgar Sheepmeadow recounts 



Julie de Poofinac 33 

it so deliciously in Volume in of " Women Large and 
Women Small " that it would be a sin not to quote 
it. " They met," he says, " on the Grand Staircase. 
The Dauphine, with her usual hauteur, was mounting 
with her head held high. Julie, by some misfortune, 
happened to get in her way. The Dauphine, not 
seeing her, trod heavily on her foot, then jogged her 
in the ribs with her elbow. Though realising who 
it was, the great lady could not but apologise. Draw- 
ing herself up as high as possible, she said in icy tones, 
* I beg your pardon! ' Quick as thought Julie replied, 
' Granted as soon as asked! ' Then with a toss of her 
curls she ran down the stairs, leaving the haughty 
Princess's mind a vortex of tumultuous feelings." 

A few words of description should undoubtedly 
be vouchsafed to the decoration of her apartments at 
Versailles. Artistic from birth, Julie de Poopinac in- 
augurated almost a revolution in colour schemes: her 
salle des fofulaces (room of the people), where she 
received supplicants for alms and various other favours, 
was upholstered in Godstone blue, with hangings of 



34 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

griffin pinkj her salle a manger (dining-room) was a 
tasteful melange of elephant green, cerise, and burnt 
umber. Her salle de bain (bathroom) deserves 
special mention, owing to its bizarre mixture of mustard 
colour and vetch purple — while her chambre a 
coucher (bedroom) was a truly fitting setting for so 
brilliant a gem. The walls were lined with costly 
Bridgeport tapestries in brown and black, picked out 
here and there with beads and tufts of gloriously 
coloured wool. The bed curtains were of soft Nor- 
wegian yellow, with massive tassels of crab mauve, 
while the carpet and upholstery were almost entirely 
Spanish crimson with head-rests of Liverpool plush! 
It was here, of course, that she wrote most of her 
poems.^ 

Her world-renowned " Idyl to Summer " : — 

" Dawn, 

The poplars droop and sway and droop, 
A lazy bee 
With wings athread with gold and green 

- The extracts here quoted translated by Elizabeth Bottle. 



Julie de Poofinac 35 

His merry way with esctasy 
He takes, amid the garden blooms — 
Ah me, ah God, ah God, ah me! 
Dawn ..." 

And the perfectly delicious light poem dedicated to 
Louis — 

" Beloved, it is morn — I rise 

To smell the roses sweet; 
Emphatic are my hips and thighs, 

Phlegmatic are my feet. 
Ten thousand roses have I got 

Within a garden small. 
Give me but strength to smell the lot, 

Oh, let me sniff them all ! " 

Then her rather sordid realistic poem to Louis's 
death-bed commencing 

"Oh, Bed 

Wherein he frequently disposed 
His weary limbs when day was done. 
His last long sleep has murmured down — 
Oh Bed — beneath your silken pall. 
His eyes aglaze with death, and dim 
JVith age — are closed. 
Oh, Bed! " 



36 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

It was of course after Louis's death that Julie was 
forced to seek retirement in her chateau in Old Brittany. 
There for many years she lived in almost complete 
seclusion, writing her books which were the inspired 
outpourings of a tortured soul : " Lilith : the Story of 
a Woman "j " The Hopeless Quest," an allegorical 
tale of the St. Malo sand-dunes, then unexplored j 
and " The Pig-Sty," a biting satire on life at 
Court. 

Then the storm-cloud of the revolution broke 
athwart the length and breadth of fair France, re- 
lentless, and indomitable and irredeemable. Julie was 
arrested while blackberrying in a Dolly Varden hat. 
With a brave smile, Ben-Hepple tells us, she flung 
the berries away. " I am ready! " she said. 

You all know of her journey to Paris, and her 
mockery of a trial before the tribunal — her pitiful * 
bravery when the inhuman monsters tried to make 
her say " A la lanterne! " Nothing would induce her 
to — she had the firmness of many ancestors behind 
her. 



Julie de Poopnac 3-7 

We will quote Ben-Hepple's vivid description of 
her execution: — 

" The day dawned grey with heavy clouds to the 
east," he says. " About five minutes past ten, a few 
rain-drops fell. The tumbrils were already rattling 
along amidst the frenzied jeers of the crowd. The 
first one contained a group of ci-devant aristos, laugh- 
ing and singing — one elderly vicomtesse was playing 
on a mouth-organ. In the second tumbril sat two 
women — one, Marie Topinambour, a poor dancer, 
was weeping j the other, Julie de Poopinac, was playing 
at cat's cradles. Her dress was of sprigged muslin, 
and she wore a rather battered Dolly Varden hat. She 
was haughtily impervious to the vile epithets of this 
mob. Upon reaching the guillotine, Marie Topin- 
ambour became panic-stricken, and swarmed up one 
of the posts before any one could stop her. In bell- 
like tones, Julie bade her descend. ^ Fear nothing, ma 
'petite* she cried. * See, I am smiling!' The terrified 
Marie looked down and was at once calmed. Julie was 
indeed smiling. One or two marquises who were 



38 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

waiting their turn were in hysterics. Marie slowly 
descended, and was quickly executed. Then Julie 
stepped forward. ^ Vive le Roi! * she cried, for- 
getting in her excitement that he was already dead, 
and flinging her Dolly Varden hat in the very teeth 
of the crowd, she laid her head in the prescribed notch. 
A woman in the mob said ^ Pauvre * and somebody 
else said ^ A has! * The knife fell. . . ." 



MADCAP MOLL 



EIGHTH DUCHESS OF WAPPING 




THE DUCHESS OF WAPPING 
From th& world-famous portrait by Sir Oswald Cronk^ Bart, 



MADCAP MOLL 

EIGHTH DUCHESS OF WAPPING 

NOBODY who knew George L could help loving 
him — he possessed that peculiar charm of 
manner which had the effect of subjugating all who 
came near him into immediate slavery. Madcap 
Moll — his true love, his one love (England still 
resounds with her gay laugh) — adored him with such 
devotion as falls to the lot of few men, be they kings 
or beggars. 

They met first in the New Forest, where Norman 
Bramp informs us, in his celebrated hunting memoirs 
" Up and Away," the radiant Juniper spent her wild, 
unfettered childhood. She was ever a care-free, un- 
disciplined creature, snapping her shapely fingers at 
bad weather, and riding for preference without a 
saddle — as hoydenish a girl as one could encounter 

41 



42 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

on a day's march. Her auburn ringlets ablow in the 
autumn wind, her cheeks whipped to a flush by the 
breeze's caress, and her eyes sparkling and brimful of 
tomboyish mischief and roguery! This, then, was the 
picture that must have met the King's gaze as he 
rode with a few trusty friends through the forest for 
his annual week of otter shooting. Upon seeing him, 
Madcap Moll gave a merry laugh, and crying " Chase 
me, George! " in provocative tones, she rode swiftly 
away on her pony. Many of the courtiers trembled 
at such a daring exhibition of lese majestSy but the 
King, provoked only by her winning smile, tossed his 
gun to Lord Twirp and set off in hot pursuit. Eventu- 
ally he caught his roguish quarry by the banks of a 
sunlit pool. She had flung herself ojBF her mount and 
flung herself on the trunk of a tree, which she bestrode 
as though it were a better and more fiery steed. The 
King cast an appraising glance at her shapely legs, and 
then tethered his horse to an old oak. 

" Are you a creature of the woods? " he said. 

Madcap Moll tossed her curls. " Ask me !, " she 
cried derisively. 



Madcap Moll 43 

" I am asking you," replied the King. 

"Odds fudge — you have spindleshanks! " cried 
Madcap Moll irrelevantly. The King was charmed. 
He leant towards her. 

"One kiss, mistress! " he implored. At that she 
slapped his face and made his nose bleed. He was 
captivated. 

" rfaith, art a daring girl," he cried delightedly. 
" Knowest who I am? " 

" I care not! " replied the girl. 

" George the First! " said the King, rising. Madcap 
Moll blanched. 

" Sire," she murmured, " I did not know — a poor, 
unwitting country lass — have mercy ! " 

The King touched her lightly on the nape. 

" Get up," he said gently j " you are as loyal and 
spirited a girl as one could meet in all Hampshire, 
I'll warrant. Hast a liking for Court.? " 

" Oh, sire! " answered the girl. 

Thus did the King meet her who was to mean every- 
thing in his life, and more. . . a 



44 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

It was twilight in the forest, Raymond Waffle tells 
us, when the King rode away. In the opposite direc- 
tion rode a pensive girl, her eyes aglow with something 
deeper than had ever before illumined their trans^ 
lucency. 

Budde Towers, according to Plabbin's " Guide to 
Hampshire," lay in the heart of the forest. Built in 
the days of William the Conqueror, 1066, and William 
Rufus, 1087, by Sir Francis Budde, it had been in- 
habited by none but Buddes of each successive 
generation. Madcap MolPs great-grandfather, Lord 
Edmund Budde,^ added a tower here and there when 
he felt inclined, while her uncle Robert Budde — 
known from Bournemouth to Lyndhurst as Bounding 
Bob — built the celebrated picture gallery (which can 
be viewed to this day by genealogical enthusiasts), the 
family portraits up to then having been stored in the 
box-room. 

Old Earl Budde, MolPs father, was as crusty an 

^ Lord Edmunde Budde married the notorious Gertrude Pippin: 
see " Family Failings," by Bloody Mary. 



Madcap Moll 45 

old curmudgeon as one could find in a county. His 
wife (the lovely Evelyn Wormgate, a daughter of the 
Duke of Bognor and Wormgate) had died while the 
radiant Moll was but a puling infant. Thus it was 
that, knowing no hancj of motherly authority, the child 
perforce ran wild throughout her dazzling adolescence. 

The trees were her playmates, the twittering of the 
birds her music — all the wild things of the forest loved 
her, specially dogs and children. She knew every 
woodcutter for miles round by his Christian name. 
" Why, here's Madcap Moll! " they would say, as the 
beautiful girl came galloping athwart her mustang, 
untamed and headstrong as she herself. 

This, then, was the priceless jewel which George I., 
spurred on by an overmastering passion, ordered to be 
transferred from its rough and homely setting to the 
ornate luxury of life at Court, where he immediately 
bestowed upon her the title of Eighth Duchess of 
Wapping. 

It was about a month after her arrival in London 
that Sir Oswald Cronk painted his celebrated life-size 



46 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

portrait of her in the costly riding-habit which was 
one of the many gifts of her royal lover. Sir Oswald, 
with his amazing technique, has managed to convey 
that suggestion of determination and resolution, one 
might almost say obstinacy, lying behind the gay, 
devil-may-care roguishness of her bewitching glance. 
Her slim, girlish figure he has portrayed with amazing 
accuracy, also the beautiful negligent manner in which 
she invariably carried her hunting-crop j her left hand 
is lovingly caressing the head of her faithful hound, 
Roger, who, Raymond Waffle informs us, after his 
mistress's death refused to bury bones anywhere else 
but on her grave. Ah me ! Would that some of our 
human friends were as unflagging in their affections 
as the faithful Roger! 

Her reign as morganatic queen was remarkable for 
several scientific inventions of great utility ^ — notably 
the " pushfast," a machine designed exclusively for the 
fixing of leather buttons in church hassocks j also Dr. 
Snaggletooth's cunning device for separating the rind 

^ See Norman Bramp's " Female Influence, and Why," Vol. V. 



Madcap Moll '/^-j 

from Camembert cheese without messing the hands! 
There were in addition to the examples here quoted 
many minor inventions which, though perhaps not of 
any individually intrinsic value, went far to illustrate 
Madcap MolPs influence on the progress of the civili- 
sation of her time. 

In Raymond Waffle's rather long-winded record 
of her life he dwells for several chapters upon the 
Papist plots which menaced her position at Court. 
After a visit to several of London's museums, I have 
discovered that most of the facts he quotes are naught 
but fallacies. There were undoubtedly plots, but 
nothing in the least Papist. She had her enemies — 
who has not? But, as far as religion was concerned. 
Papists, Protestants, Wesleyans, and occasionally 
Mahommedans, all joined together in unstinting praise 
of her character and judgment. 

Any faults or acts of thoughtlessness committed 
during her brilliant life were amply compensated for 
by the supreme deed of loyalty and patriotism which, 
alas! marked the tragic close of her all too short career. 



48 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

Her ride to Norwich — show me the man whose pulses 
do not thrill at the mention of that heroic achievement! 
That wonderful, wonderful ride — that amazing, 
glorious tour de force which caused her name to be 
revered and hallowed in every sleepy hamlet and hovel 
of Old England — her ride to Norwich on Piebald 
Polly, her thoroughbred mare! On, on through the 
night — a fitful moon scrambling aslant the cloud- 
blown heavens, the wind whistling past her ears, and 
the tune of " God Save the King " ringing in her brain, 
the rhythm set by the convulsive movements of Piebald 
Polly. On, on, through towns and villages, and then 
once more the open country — what is that noise ? The 
roaring of water! Torrents are unloosed — the dam 
has burst! Miller's Leap. Can she do it? — can she? 
— can she? She can — and has. Dawn shows in the 
eastern sky — the lights of Norwich — Norwich 
at last! ^ 

Poor Moll! the day that dawned as she sped along 

^ It has never yet been ascertained exactly why Madcap Moll 
rode to Norwich, but many conjectures have been hazarded. 



Madcap Moll 49 

those weary roads was to prove itself her last. Her 
exhaustion was so great on reaching the city gates that 
she fell from Piebald Polly's drooping back and never 
regained consciousness. 

Rumour asserts that the King plunged the country 
in mourning for several weeks — some say he never 
smiled again. Madcap Moll, Eighth Duchess of 
Wapping, left behind her no children, but she left en- 
graved upon the hearts of all who knew her the memory 
of a beautiful, noble, and winsome woman. 



E. MAXWELL SNURGE 

AN INTIMATE STUDY 




ELM 



E. MAXWELL SNURGE, Eminent Politician 



E. MAXWELL SNURGE 

An Intimate Study 

I WILL not seek to write of E. Maxwell Snurge as 
his friends have written of him, tall, courageous, 
and vitally intelligent. Nor as his enemies have chron- 
icled him, short, fat and intensely stupid. I will en- 
deavour with a few brief flourishes of the pen, to 
portray the various intricacies of his character as I see 
them, clearly and dispassionately with the eyes of a 
psychological observer, whose hand is uncorrupted by 
the bribes of ruthless profiteers, grafters and the like. 

It is my desire to convey to the reader the real E. 
Maxwell Snurge shorn of tawdry trappings of party 
politics and the illusion and glamour of public idolatry 
— a man — just a man — but what a man! 

To dwell on the widely circulated story of his life 
would be needless, and to follow his political career, 



54 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

merely futile. What is there left? you ask. And 
I answer you with extreme firmness, there is one aspect 
of E. Maxwell Snurge which has never been seriously 
analysed — his soul ! And it is that and that alone 
which will be the foundation stone of my structural 
portrayal of his character. 

Why wasn't E. Maxwell Snurge president of the 
United States? Many have asked that question, he 
frequently used to ask it himself, and his wife — the 
sainted Amy Snurge of ever revered memory — would 
rest her thin, ascetic hand upon his coat sleeve and 
answer him with yearning sympathy but little satis- 
faction — Why? 

Let us turn to an early episode in his career in our 
search for the key to the complexities of his mind, an 
episode slight in itself but well worthy of recording 
if only for the illumination it throws upon the much 
questioned motives of his later actions. He was spend- 
ing a week-end with friends on Long Island — a fishing 
week-end. Mrs. Jake Van Opus (formerly the lovely 
Consuelo Root) out of consideration for her eminent 



E. Maxwell Snurge $$ 

guest and with great tact and charm, immediately he 
arrived made a point of forbidding politics as a subject 
for discussion in the house, and confined the general 
conversation exclusively to fish. That this thoughtful 
act was appreciated by the overworked politician it is 
needless to remark} he settled down to his brief respite 
with a tranquil contentment and complete blankness 
of mind which only the cleverest of us can assume 
at will. 

Athletic from birth, Snurge cast his line repeatedly 
far out to sea with the strength and dogged persever- 
ance which characterised his every deed — but alas, 
nearly fifteen hours went by before his patience was 
rewarded. Day had turned to dusk and the sun was 
setting when he was suddenly jerked from the fishing 
stand into the water. With an exultant shout, he clam- 
bered on to a rock still clasping his rod — "A Bite, a 
Bite!" he cried in tones strangely alien from those he 
customarily employed when addressing a civic confer- 
ence. " A Bite at last! " Playing his submarine quarry 
with extraordinary finesse, he eventually, amid laud- 



^6 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

atory shouts and frantic cheering, landed an exqui- 
sitely striped bass, which lay at his feet gasping, 
apparently quite exhausted by its struggles to evade 
captivity. Now comes the point of the story, Snurge 
surveyed his catch quietly for a few moments — those 
standing near by noticed sternly repressed tears in his 
eyes — then he said a thing which come what may will 
eternally prove him the possessor of unparalleled in- 
sight and humanity. Touching the recumbent fish 
gently with his foot he sighed deeply — 

" This bass is Democracy," he murmured, " And 
see what I have done with it! " Superstitious observers 
state that at this point the bass closed its eyes wearily, 
but this may only be a fanatical exaggeration. 

Then with a set face he lifted the fish high above 
his head and flung it back into its native element, there- 
by undoing the efforts of many hours' untiring labour 
and patience. 

I have told this story in order to illustrate definitely 
the initial weakness in his lifelong policy, call it folly 
if you like, or even imbecility, but I prefer to assign to 



E. Maxwell Snurge 57 

it the one all embracing word — " Generosity." He 
was too generous, all through his career he sacrificed 
everything through his generous capacity for seeing and 
sympathising with both sides of every question. Many, 
many times he would shelve the carefully formulated 
schemes of months on the sudden realisation of what 
the Opposition would suffer if he carried them through. 

Think — as I sometimes think — what a sad thing, 
what a vortex of conflicting emotions the heart of Amy 
Snurge must have been during those hard years, know- 
ing her husband's strength and resource, deploring 
yet loving his weakness, encouraging, aiding and abet- 
ting his every act with the feminine pertinacity which 
has characterized the world's greatest heroines. Poor 
woman, no wonder the grave claimed her so soon, for 
like the bass — like Democracy, her vitality was ex- 
hausted by the destructive and constructive force of 
Snurge. Only unlike the bass she couldn't swim well, 
and unlike Democracy she had the man to contend 
with as well as the politician. 

Snurge was by no means a revolutionary j he pos- 



58 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

sessed too many ideals and too little passion, he was 
essentially a passionless man — except of course the one 
historic occasion during his campaign against prohibi- 
tion when he completely lost control, and flying low in 
a government aeroplane broke a bottle of green char- 
treuse over the head of the Statue of Liberty. 

The uproar which was the natural outcome of this 
defiant protest, was abruptly stemmed by the sudden 
reversal of his tactics on the day following the event, 
when he made a spirited appeal in West Forty-Second 
Street for prohibition! This resulted in a hopeless 
gloom enveloping the metropolis. The populace 
commenced to realise in a measure the unreliability of 
Snurge as a saviour of the state, while at the same time 
fully appreciating his many sterling qualities. 

Dark things were whispered in the White House. 

One need not go far then to seek the reason for his 
fall from grace, his utter failure as a Republican candi- 
date for the presidency — it was his generosity, his 
innate humanity, and his extraordinary breadth and 
clarity of vision. 



E. Maxwell Snurge 59 

If this man had but been president in 19 14 there 
might not have been any war. Had he been president 
in 1776 there might not have been any revolution, and 
had he but been president in 1491 God knows what 
there might not have been. 

REFERENCE 

America in Sunshine and Shadow B. F. Bramf. 2 Vols. 

The Roguish Royalist Anonymous 

Mirrors of Salt Lake City By the Gentleman with the Cusfidor, 

5 Vols. 
Amy Snurge, a Grand Woman Ernest Fraffle. 2 Vols. 
" Columbia Beware! " Weedheim. 

I am also deefly indebted to Esther Throtch for her unlimited 
energy and devoted assistances. 



BIANCA DI PIANNO-FORTI 



*!^*«««II«II«MM)BW4MP[ 




BiA/^tA^i piX^/yfi F bgXli- 



BIANCA DI PIANNO-FORTI 
After an etigraving by Vittorio Camfa?iele 



BIANCA DI PIANNO-FORTI 

MEDIi^VAL Italy has in its time boasted many 
beautiful women, but there is one who must 
take her place before them all, one whose name is a 
byword to this day in every corner of that sun-washed 
country — Bianca di Pianno-Forti. One shudders at 
that name — so radiant was she, and yet so incredibly 
evil. Her tragic death somehow seems a fitting ending 
to a life such as hers — a life so without mercy, so with- 
out pity, and yet so amazingly vivid that it seems to be 
emblazoned on Italy's very heart. 

She first saw the light in Florence. Her father, 
Allegro, of the celebrated house of Andante Caprioso, 
married at the age of fourteen Giulia Presto, of Verona, 
at the age of nine. At the birth of Bianca her mother 
died, leaving her to the care of her broken-hearted 
father and brother Pizzicato (destined later on to 

63 



y 



64 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

make the world ring with his music). Perhaps the 
only thing to be said in excuse of Bianca's later conduct 
is the fact that she never knew a mother's love. The 
nuns at the convent wherein she spent her ripening 
childhood were kindj but, alas! they were not 
mothers — at least, not all of them. Bianca left the 
convent when she was sixteen. Slim, lissom, sinuous, 
with those arresting eyes that seemed, so Fibinio tells 
us, to search out the very souls of all who came near her. 
Her first love affair occured about a week after her 
arrival in her home in Florence. She was in the habit 
of walking to mass at the cathedral with her maid 
Vivace. One morning, so Poliolioli relates, a hand- 
some soldier stepped out of the shadows of an adjoin- 
ing buttress and looked at her. Bianca at once swooned. 
The same thing happened again — and again — and 
yet again. One night she heard the shutters of her 
bedchamber rattle! "Who is there? " she cried, yet 
not too loudly, because her woman's instinct warned 
her to be wary. The shutters were flung open, and 
the young soldier stepped flamboyantly into the room. 



Bianca di Pianno-Forti 65 

" I am here, cara, car a mia! " he cried. " I, Vibrato 
Adagio! " With a sibilant cry she fell into his out- 
stretched arms. " Mio, wio," she echoed in ecstasy, 
" I am yours and you are mine! " So lightly was the 
first stepping-stone passed on her reckless path of im- 
morality and vice. Her fickle heart soon tired of the 
debonair Vibrato, and in a fit of satiated pique she had 
his ears cut off and his tongue removed and tied to his 
big toe. Thus was her ever-increasing lust for blood- 
shed apparent even at that early age. Her next affaire 
occured when she was travelling to Rome with her 
brother Pizzicato, who was to become a chorister at the 
Vatican. On stopping for refreshment at a wayside 
tavern, Bianca was struck by the arresting looks of the 
ostler who was tending their steaming steeds. Beckon- 
mg to him, she asked of him his namej he turned his 
vacant eyes round and round wonderingly for a 
moment. " Crescendo," he replied. Bianca's eyes 
flashed fire. ^^ Accelerate ! " she cried imperiously, 
and, hypnotised into submission, the scared man fled 
upstairs, Bianca following. 



66 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

Upon arriving in Rome, Bianca and Pizzicato re- 
paired to their father's brother-in-law, who was well 
known as a lavish entertainer. He was one Rapida- 
mente Tempo di Valse, a widower, living with his two 
sons. Lento and Comprino, handsome lads both in 
the first flush of manhood, and both destined to fall 
victims to Bianca's compelling attractions. Contempo- 
rary history informs us that Bianca stayed in the Palazzo 
Tempo di Valse for seven years, visiting Pizzicato from 
time to time, and employing herself with various love 
affairs. 

In June she became betrothed to Duke Crazioso di 
Pianno-Forti, of the famous family of Moderato 
e Diminuendo — indirectly descended from the 
Cardinal Appassionato Tutti. Tutti was the great- 
uncle of the infamous Con Spirito, well known to 
posterity as the lover of the lovely but passionate 
Violenza Allargando, destined to become the mother 
of Largo con Craviata, the fearless captain of Dol- 
cissimo's light horse under General Lamento Agitato, 
whose grandmother, Sempre Calando, was notorious 



Bianca di Pianno-Forti 67 

for her illicit liaison with Pesante e Stentato, a union 
which was to bear fruit in the shape of Lusingando 
Molto. 

Bianca's wedding was celebrated with enormous re- 
joicing in Venice, where was situated the ducal palace 
of the Pianno-Fortis. Mention should be made of the 
life led by Bianca during the first years of her mar- 
riage, of her pet staghounds, of her tapestried bed- 
chamber with bloodthirsty scenes of the chase depicted 
thereon — how she loved blood, this beautiful 
girl! 

Her portrait herein reproduced is after an engraving 
by Campanelej note the sinister line of the cheek-bone 
and the passionate beauty of the nethermost lip! One 
can visualise her — radiant at the head of crowded 
dining-tables, drinking from gem-encrusted goblets, 
accepting glances fraught with ardent desire from one 
or other of the male guests. 

All the world knows of her famous visit to the Pope, 
and how he died a few hours later j while it would be 
mere repetition of general knowledge to enlarge on her 



68 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

so j urn with the Doge, and his subsequent demise. Let 
us touch ever so lightly on her three children, Poco, 
Confuoco, and Strepitoso. How could they help being 
beautiful with such a mother, poor mites, branded from 
birth with the sense of their impending fate! After a 
while Bianca became aware that tongues were a-wag in 
Venice, sullying her name with foul calumnies. Her 
decision for their downfall was swift and terrible. She 
persuaded her easy-going husband to ride to Naples j 
then, free of his cumbersome authority, she set to work 
on the preparations for her world-famous supper party. 
Picture it if you will: five hundred and eighty-three 
guests ^ all seated laughingly in the immense banquet- 
ing-hall — Bianca at the head of the table, superb, 
incomparable, her corsage a glittering mass of gems, 
her breast chilled by the countless diamonds on her 
camisole, her smile radiant and a peach-like flush on 
the ivory pallor of her face. This was indeed her 
hour — her triumph — her subtle revenge. Her 

^ PoUoHoli contends that there were five hundred and eighty- 
five guests. This, I think, may be treated as a moot point. 



Bianca di Pianno-Forti 69 

heart thrilled with the knowledge of that inward secret 
that was hers immutably, for every morsel of food and 
drink upon that festive board was impregnated with the 
deadliest poison — all except the two pieces of toast 
with which she regaled herself, having dined earlier 
and alone. 

Historians tell us that following close on that event 
some rather ugly rumours were noised abroad — in 
fact, some of the relatives of the poisoned guests even 
went so far as to complain to various people in authority 
and stir up strife in every way possible. Bianca was 
naturally furious. Some say that it was her sudden 
rage on hearing this that caused her to burn her children 
to death J others say her act was merely due to bad 
temper owing to a sick headache. Anyhow, as later 
events go to show, she had chosen the very worst time 
to murder her children. More ugly rumours were 
at once noised abroad by those who were jealous of her. 
Upon her husband's return from Naples he was im- 
mediately arrested, and a few days later hung. Too 
late the hapless Bianca sought to make her escape j she 



70 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

was caught and taken prisoner while swimming across 
the Grand Canal with her clothes and a few personal 
effects in a bundle in her mouth. She was carried 
shrieking to Milan, where she endured a mockery of a 
trial J on political grounds she was sentenced to being 
torn to pieces by she-goats at Genoa. Poor, beautiful 
Bianca! On the fulfilment of her unjust and bar- 
barous sentence it is too horrible to dwell at any length. 
This glorious creature, this resplendent vision, this di- 
vine goddess — she-goats! Dreadful, degrading, 
unutterable ! ! ! 

The day for her death ^ dawned fair over the Medi- 
terranean. Bianca, garbed in white, walked with dig- 
nity into the meadow wherein the she-goats anxiously 
awaited her. She bravely repressed a shudder, and fell 
upon her knees. History tells us that every goat 
turned away, as though ashamed of the part it was 
destined to play. Then, with a look of ineffable peace 
stealing over her waxen face, Bianca rose to her full 

^ October 14th. PoUolioli contests that it was the lyth, but this, 
I venture to say, is even a " mooter " point than the other. 



Bianca di Pianno-Forti 71 

height, and, flinging her arms heavenwards, she de- 
livered that celebrated and heartrending speech which 
has lived after her for so long: — 
" Dio mtOy concerto — concerto! " 
One by one the she-goats advanced. . . . 



SARAH, LADY TUNNELL-PENGE 




SARAH, LADY TUNNELL-PENGE 
From a fainting by Augustus Punter 



SARAH, LADY TUNNELL-PENGE 

("Winsome Sal ^0 

FFRADDLE of 1643 was very different from the 
Ff raddle of 1789, and still more different from 
the Ff raddle of 1832. At a time when civil war was 
raging between Jacobites and Papists and Roundheads 
and Ironsides and everything, Ffraddle stood grey, 
silent and indomitable — the very spirit of peace allied 
with strength seemed embodied in its grim masonry. 
The clash of arms and the death cries from millions of 
rebellious throats which echoed athwart the length and 
breadth of young England were unable to pierce the 
stillness of Ffraddle's moated security. Owls mur- 
mured on its battered turrets, sparrows perched on its 
portcullis, cuckoos cooed all over it, heedless indeed of 
the turmoil and frenzied strife raging outside its feudal 
gates 

7S 



^6 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

What a birthplace for one of history's most priceless 
pearls — Sarah Twig! The heart of every lover of 
beauty leaps and jumps and starts at the sound of that 
name — Sarah Twig. Why are some destined for so 
much while others are destined, alas! for so little? 
Who knows? Sarah — a rose-leaf, a crumpled atom, 
dropped as it were from some heavenly garden into 
the black times of the Merry Monarch — when, ac- 
cording to Bloodworthy, virtue was laughed to scorn 
and evil went unpunished j when, according to Follygob, 
virginity was a scream, and harlotry a hobby j and 
when, according to Sheepmeadow, homeliness was sin, 
and beauty but a gilded casket concealing vice and 
depravity unutterable. 

History relates that though food was scarce and 
light hearts hard to find, at the birth of Sarah Twig 
there was no dearth of these commodities. The snow 
was on the ground, Follygob says — the woods and 
coppices and hills lay slumbering beneath a glistening 
white mantle. What a mind ! To have written those 
words! It was undoubtedly FoUygob's artistic style 



Sarahy Lady Tunnell-Penge 77 

and phraseology that branded him once and for all as 
the master-chronicler of his time. 

Sarah Twig was born in the east wing, a lofty 
room which can be viewed to this day by all true lovers 
of historical architecture. To describe it adequately is 
indeed difficult. Some say there was a bed in it and 
an early Norman window j others have it that there 
was no bed but a late Gothic fireplace j while a few out- 
standing writers insist that there was nothing at all in 
the room but a very old Roman washstand.^ 

The night of Sarah's birth was indeed a wild one — 
snow and sleet eddied and swirled around the massive 
structure destined to harbour one whose radiant beauty 
was to be a byword in all Europe. The wind, so 
Follygob with his incomparable style tells us, lashed 
itself to a livid fury against the sturdy Ffraddle 
turrets and mullions, whilst outside beyond the keep 
and raised drawbridge the beacons and camp fires 
stained the frost-laden air with vivid streaks of red 
and yellow — colours which formed the background 
^ Excavated b.c. 8. 



78 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

of the Ffraddle coat of arms, thus presenting an omen 
to the startled inhabitants which history relates they 
were not slow to recognise. 

Bloodworthy describes for us the plan by which 
Lord Ffraddle was to acquaint the village with the 
sex of the child. If it were a boy, red fire was to be 
burnt on the south turret, and if a girl, green fire 
was to be burnt on the north turret j but unfortu- 
nately, he goes on to tell us, owing to some mis- 
adventure blue fire was firmly burnt on all the turrets. 
Imagine the horror of the superstitious populace! 
Some left the country never to return, crying aloud 
that a chameleon had been born to their beloved 
chatelaine! 

Of Sarah's youth historians tell us little. She was, 
apart from her beauty, a very knowing child. Often 
when missing from the banqueting-hall she would 
be discovered in the library reading and studying the 
political works of the period.^ Often Lord Ffraddle 

^ Periodicals: — "The Corn Chandler," by Sheepmeadowj 
" Sidelights on the Salic Law," Anonymous; " The Stage versus 
the Church," edited alternately by Nell Gwyn and the Archbishop 
of Canterbury. 



Sarahy Lady Tunnell-Penge 79 

was known to remark in his usual witty way, " In sooth, 
the child will soon have as much knowledge as her 
father," a sally which was invariably received with 
shrieks of delight by the infant Sarah, whose brilliant 
sense of humour was plainly apparent, even at that 
early age. 

Her adolescence was remarkable for little save the 
rapid development of her supple loveliness, some idea 
of which can be gauged from the reproduction of 
Punter's famous portrait on page 74. Though painted 
at a somewhat later date, this masterpiece still presents 
us with most of the leading characteristics of its ravish- 
ing model. Note the eyes — the dreamy, cognisant 
expression} glance at the pretty mouth and the dainty 
ears. Her demeanour is obviously that of a meek and 
modest woman, but Punter, with his true genius, has 
caught that glint of inward fire, that fleeting look of 
shy mischief that earned for her the world-famous 
nickname of " Winsome Sal." 

It was when she was eighteen^ that Destiny, with 
^ Two years before Punter's portrait. 



8o Terribly Intimate Portraits 

inhuman cunning, caught up in his net the fragile ball 
of her life. 

The handsome, devil-may-care Julius Fenchurch- 
Streete applied to Lord Ffraddle for a secretaryship, 
which was ultimately granted to him. Imagine the 
situation — this rake, this dark-eyed ne'er-do-well, 
notorious all down Cheapside for his relentless dalli- 
ance with the fair, placed in intimate proximity with 
one of England's most glorious specimens of ripening 
womanhood. It was, Sheepmeadow writes, like the 
meeting of flint and tinder — these two so widely 
different in the essentials and yet so akin in their physi- 
cal beauty. As was inevitable, from the first they 
loved — he with the flaming passion of a hell-rake, 
she with the sweet, appealing purity of one whose whole 
life had been peculiarly virginal. There followed 
swiftly upon their ardent confessions the determination 
to elope together. The night they bade adieu to 
Ffraddle and all it held is well known to young and 
old of every generation. They crept from their rooms 
at midnight and met at the top of the grand staircase, 



Sarah) Lady Tunnell-Penge 8i 

down which they proceeded to crawl on all fours. A 
few moments later they were on a sturdy mare, she 
riding pillion, he riding anyhow. Not a sound had 
been heard, not a dog had barked, not a bird had called. 
Once, Sheepmeadow informs us. Lady Ff raddle turned 
over in her sleep.^ Poor, unsuspecting mother! On 
and on through the snow rode the feckless couple. 
Once Sarah rested her hand lightly on her lover's arm. 
" Whither are we bound? " she inquired. " Only the 
mare knows that," Julius replied, and in shaken silence 
they rode on. 

History is not very enlightening as to how long 
Julius Fenchurch-Streete lived with Sarah Twig — 
poor Sarah, the bubble of her romance soon was to be 
pricked. For three weeks they lived gloriously, radi- 
antly, at the old sign of " The Cod and Haddock " 
in Egham. " My heart is a pool of ecstasy," she wrote 
in her diary. Pitiful pool, so soon to be drained 
of its joy! 

^ " Beds and their Inmates," Vol. III., by Edgar Sheepmeadow 
(i8 vols.). 



82 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

Then the storm-clouds gathered, the sun with- 
drew its gold. Julius rode away — Sarah was alone, 
alone in Egham, her love unblessed by any sort of 
church, no name for the child to come — a sorry, 
sorry plight. The buxom proprietress of " The Cod 
and Haddock," little dreaming her real identity, set 
her to work. Work! for those fair hands, those 
inexpressibly filbert nails! 

Was it the sudden relenting of malleable fate that 
caused the Merry Monarch to come riding blithely 
through sleepy Egham, followed by his equerry. Lord 
Francis Tunnell-Penge, and several of his suite? 
Halting outside the inn, Bloodworthy relates that his 
Majesty was immediately struck by a winsome face at 
an upper window. " Lud ! " he cried laconically, and 
dismounted, taking several dogs from his hat as he 
did so, and one from his pocket j for he was devoted 
to animals, Bloodworthy goes on to say, and often spent 
days stroking their soft ears abstractedly. Then, seized 
by a sudden inspiration, he inquired of the landlady 
as to whose was the face he had seen. In a trice the 



Sarah y Lady Tunnell-Penge 83 

story was told — the King waved his hand imperi- 
ously and took a pinch of snuff. " Send her to me," 
he said. 

When Sarah entered, all hot from her manual 
labours, Charles started to his feet. Here was no 
scullion, no plaything of an idle hour. Here was 
breeding, dignity and beauty. Ah! Beauty! Prob- 
ably these cold shores will never again shelter beauty 
like Sarah Twig's. On seeing the King she curtsied 
low. He bowed with the stately elegance for which 
he was famed. 

" Your name? " he asked. 

The glorious vision veiled her eyes. 

" I have no name, sire — now." With these words, 
spoken from a heart surcharged with bitterest sorrow, 
the poor woman swooned away. 

" Lud! " remarked the King irritably, " the girl 
must have a name. You must marry her, Francis — 
she shall be Lady Tunnell-Penge." Then the impul- 
sive monarch stooped, and, opening a locket on the 
unconscious woman's breast, read the name Sarah in 



84^ Terribly Intimate Portraits 

blue diamonds on an opaque background. " But," 
he added softly under his breath, " I shall know her 
only as ^ Winsome Sal ' ! " 

Thus Sarah Twig, so nearly an outcast through her 
own girlish folly, became possessor of a name honoured 
and even adored throughout England. 

The first few years of her life at Court were more 
or less uneventful — she saw little of her husband 
and lots of the King. He and she used to wander 
along the river side, simply loaded with different dogs. 
Whenever there were theatricals given, Sheepmeadow 
tells us, Sarah invariably appeared as Diana or Minerva, 
preferring these parts on account of their suitability 
to her youth and figure. All these events took place 
long after Punter's portrait, though several others were 
done latterly. Her wit and gaiety were of course 
world-famed, and her political treatises are preserved 
to this day.^ 

On one dramatic occasion her brilliant political 
knowledge and presence of mind were the means of 
^ These are all in the Brighton Aquarium. 



Sarah y Lady Tunnell-Penge 85 

saving England from turmoil or worse. Hearing that 
the people were hungry and restless, Sarah rushed to 
the King. " What's to do? " she cried breathlessly. 

" God knows," replied Charles, adding " Lud ! " 
as an afterthought. Then he went on fondling the 
long silky ears of one of his lap-dogs with which the 
room was strewn. 

Heartbroken, Sarah left the room and rushed out 
of Whitehall as fast as her legs could carry her, heed- 
ing not the jeers of the crowd. She made for Tower 
Hill, from the summit of which she delivered her 
world-famous political speech, ending with the stirring 
words, " Sift your corn through sieves ! " 

How that speech sends a throb to one's heart — the 
defiance of it, the subtlety of it, and yet the intense 
womanliness of it! The people cheered her back to 
the palace. She went straight to the King's room — 
he was feeding his dogs. 

" I've saved England! " cried Sarah exultantly. 

"Lud! " replied the King, and handed her some 
cat's-meat. No wonder women loved him! 



86 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

Incidents like these went to make up the multi- 
coloured mosaic o£ Sarah, Lady Tunnell-Penge's life. 
Her children were many — Arthur, later on Lord 
Crumpingfaxj Muriel, later the Duchess of Drippj 
and various others. 

She died at the age of seventy-nine,^ thus outliving 
her Royal paramour. A beautiful life, a noble life, 
a gentle life — yet was there something missing? 
Sometimes I gaze at her portrait and wonder. 
^, At Pragg Castle, near Hull. 



JABEZ PUFFWATER 




JABEZ PUFFWATER, of Oggsville, Kentucky 



JABEZ PUFFWATER 

JABEZ PUFFWATER might have been so much 
physically, mentally and publicly and has been so 
little any way that a tattered moral must hang sadly 
upon the gaunt tree of his career. 

He might have been many things — he might have 
been a successful theatrical manager, or only an 
artistic one — he might have been a naval commander, 
or a psychoanalyst, or a Christian Science healer — 
he might have imparted to the United States Senate that 
infinitesimal something which would probably have 
proved to be the greatest comfort, especially in the cold 
weather. 

If Mr. Belasco had not preferred Mr. David 
Warfield, Jabez Puffwater might have made an 
enormous success in " The Return of Peter Grimm " — 
had he but possessed an aptitude for histrionic achieve- 



90 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

ment. He might have sung at the Metropolitan year 
after year without ceasing if Miss Geraldine Farrar had 
not taken an instantaneous dislike to him at sight — 
and had he but possessed a flamboyant temperament 
and an elementary knowledge of Puccini. In fact there 
is almost nothing he couldn't have been if only Fate 
had but weaned him at the breast of opportunity instead 
of ordaining his life drama to be played out in lonely 
dignity in the drab but intensely political village of 
Oggsville, Ken. 

Oggsville, Ken. has been for many years a hotbed of 
occasionally seditious, but always subtle intrigue, the 
constructive and progressive policy of the upper part 
of the town, near the railway bridge, being in direct 
opposition to the destructive statesmanship and con- 
stitutional conventionality of the lower residential 
quarter embracing the timber-yard, Elijah Square, and 
Aunt Martha's Soda Fountain. Naturally Jabez Puff- 
water, whose modest store stood figuratively and 
literally at the crossing of the ways, was always in 
a somewhat uncertain state of mind as to which side 



Jabez Pujf water 9 1 

he should ultimately pin his colours. Perhaps on a 
Tuesday St. John Eddie, a staunch upholder of the 
C. and P.P., would enter Jabez's store and hit him in 
the face because he'd sent a tin of sardines to the 
Furdlehoe Mansion on the other side of the River. 
And maybe on a Friday Moses Whortleberry, a lead- 
ing light of the D. S. and C. C. would belabour him 
with one of his own hams for daring to acquaint old 
Hiram Holdit, the station master, with the result of 
the cocoa coupon competition. 

One thing stood out firmly amid the turmoil of 
Jabez's environment — and that was his idealistic and 
almost fanatical admiration of the exploits of Buffalo 
Bill as depicted on the screen and retailed in small 
paper-bound books. Indeed so struck was he by the 
verve and virility of this astounding man that he took 
to attiring his lower limbs — which seldom showed 
above the counter — in the breeches, leggings, belt 
and pistol so well known to all lovers of the limitless 
prairie. The infinite pathos of Jabez Puffwater's blind 
devotion to one whom he had never seen will not fail 



92 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

to strike home to the stoniest heart. The tragedy of 
this man whose dauntless spirit so far outgrew his 
physical appearance — being compelled to sell cheeses, 
hams, molasses, etc, in order to live, is far more pitiful 
to me than the stern virginity of Queen Elizabeth, or 
even the nose of Cyrano de Bergerac. 

It was when Jabez Puffwater had just reached his 
forty-third birthday that he first became seriously 
implicated in that political bombshell, the Goodge- 
Keewee Treaty made out with masterful cunning by 
Albert Goodge and Nicholas Keewee, with the sole 
motive of undermining the transcontinental railroad 
system to a devastating degree. The various reasons 
both for and against this daring policy are so excellently 
and clearly put forward in Vernon Treeby's " When 
Southern Blood is Dripping " that I will not attempt 
to go into it here. Enough that it caused an unpar- 
alleled sensation in Oggsville, Ken. and was indirectly 
the means of introducing into the heart of Jabez 
Puffwater the secret fear which was destined to grow 
ever larger and larger until eventually its black wings 



Jabez Pujf water 93 

beat his battered soul into eternity. " The fear of 
a Black Rising! " Jabez was undcaibtedly a man of 
more than average courage but after reading the 
Goodge-Keewee Treaty he went back to his store a 
harassed man. What did it all mean? Nobody knew. 
Ah, God! If only Jabez Puffwater had possessed the 
inspiring rhetoric of a Bernard Proon, or the imposing 
presence of a Freddie Hooter, what a lot he could have 
done. As it was he just went home — aching — yet 
withal as yet subconsciously — for the ability to be of 
use in some way, the opportunity of distinguishing 
himself and saving his beloved home town from the 
awful effects of the fear that was fated from now 
onward to be with him always — the dreaded Black 
Rising. 

For many years after that fateful conference Jabez 
was to be seen every evening seated outside his store 
with a horse pistol in his hand ever pointed in the 
direction of the wooded hills to the Southward. Little 
boys on their way home from school would throw mud 
at him, but he never heeded themj little girls would 



94 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

make rude noises quite near him with their rubber over- 
shoes, but he ignored them utterly. I often wonder on 
looking back what Douglas Bogtoe would have been 
had he but possessed one half of Puffwater's concen- 
trated repose. That celebrated appeal for the Louisiana 
Canal installation would have been worded very differ- 
ently and as for his world-famed piscatorial argument 
with Olaf Campbell in the Brooke Club — that would 
have probably been approached from an entirely 
opposite angle. 

To analyse and compare Bogtoe's electrical psychol- 
ogy with the phlegmatic determination and boyish 
zeal of PufFwater would take, alas, too longj so I 
will not seek to say more than that had the two widely 
diflFerentiated spirits but been combined within the 
same material tissues — that a quainter nor a more 
peculiar juxtaposition of entities it would have been 
hard to find, search where you may. 

I try occasionally to picture to myself the lonely 
horror-stricken nights Jabez PufFwater must have 
endured with that appalling fear always crouching 



Jabez Pujf water 95 

within him, egging him on towards the culminating 
tragedy of his sad career. 

There had been talk of a lynching in New Orleans 
and of a shooting in Old Virginia and there were even 
whispers of a slapping in Alabama. 

Jabez was priming his pistol one morning while he 
hastily scanned the elevating disclosures — social and 
otherwise — of the New York American, when a 
breathless woman rode up to the store on a tricycle. 
She delivered a note to Jabez and waited while he 
read it. 

" Come at once — am exceedingly ill — Aunt 
Topsy." 

Jabez thought for a moment — then crushing down 
his rising apprehensions he mounted his mare Buffalo 
Babs and made for the hills. 

Ten miles there and ten miles back, and the fear 
always with him — the fear of the Black Rising. 

Many psychoanalysts have endeavoured to dis- 
cover the exact motive for Jabez Puffwater's sudden 
and unexpected slaying of his old Aunt Topsy — whose 



96 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

coal-black arms had fondled him as a baby. Many 
theories have been put forward, but none of them — 
with the exception, perhaps, of Herman Pipper — 
possess the ring of truth. Pipper's deduction of the 
circumstantial evidence is that it was all the outcome 
of a naughty practical joke played by little Michael 
Drisher who appeared suddenly during Jabez's inter- 
view with his Aunt and burst the awful news upon them 
that there had been a fearful Black Rising in Oggsville, 
Ken. and that debauch — murder — and worse were 
going on all over the globe. 

" With a great cry," Pipper tells us, " Jabez smote 
his brow. * At last ! ' he moaned in deep anguish. * At 
last it has come! ' Then he turned, and seizing a large 
milk bottle he battered the head of Aunt Topsy, crying 
the while in the voice of a fanatic, * For my home 
town! For my home town! This is a just re- 
prisal! ! ! ' Then with a last look at the havoc he 
had wrought he went out of the house and into the 
wilderness — " 

Pipper's imaginative description ends too abruptly 



Jahez Pujf water 97 

to be really satisfactory j but one fact about the life of 
Jabez Puffwater will remain emblazoned on America's 
history for time immemorial — that if he had only 
possessed the rhetoric of a Proon — the presence of 
a Hooter — the education of a Floop — the racial 
understanding of a Bogtoe and the mentality of a 
Snurge — he would not only have proved himself 
invaluable to the home constituency of Oggsville, Ken. 
but have been an entirely different man altogether. 



FURSTIN LIEBERWURST ZU 
SCHWEINEN-KALBER 




GRETCHEN LIEBERWURST ZU SCHWEINEN-KALBER 

From the famous etching by Grobmeyer 



FURSTIN LIEBERWURST ZU 
SCHWEINEN-KALBER 

HOW strange it seems that she of whom we write 
is dust and less than dust below the fertile soil of 
her so beloved Prussia — Furstin Lieberwurst zu 
Schweinen-Kalber! Can you not rise from the grave 
once more to charm us with the magic of your voice? 
Are those deep, mellowed tones, so sonorous and 
appealing, never to be heard again? Ah, me! Why, 
indeed, should such divinity be so short lived? Who 
could play Juliet as she could? Nobody! Her enemies 
laughed and said that her chronic adenoids utterly 
destroyed all the beauty of the part. Jealousy! Vile 
jealousy! Genius always has that to contend with. 
Every one has failings. Gretchen Lieberwurst zu 
Schweinen-Kalber made of Juliet a woman — a pul- 

lOI 



102 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

sating, human woman, with failings like the rest of 
us, the chief of which happened to be adenoids.^ 

To trace this soul-stirring actress to her obscure 
birth has indeed been a labour — but withal, a labour 
of love! For who could help experiencing exquisite 
joy at unearthing trinkets and miniatures and broken 
memories of such a radiant being? 

Nuremburg, red-roofed and gleaming in the sun- 
light, was the place wherein she first saw the light 
of day. Her father, Peter Schmidt, was by trade a 
sausage-moulder, for in those far'-ofF days there was 
not the vast machinery of civilisation to wield the good 
meat into the requisite shape. Gretchen, when a girl, 
often used to watch her father as he plied his trade 
and recite to him verses she had learnt at her dame 
school — fragments from the Teutonic masterpieces 
of the time — " Kruschen Kruschen," and — 

" Baby white and baby red, 
Like a moon convulsive 
Rolling up and down the bed, 
Utterly repulsive! " — 

^ See Sheepmeadow's " Heroines and their Diseases." 



Furstin Lieberwurst zu Schweinen-Kalber 103 

a beautiful little lullaby of Herman VeigePs. Gret- 
chen used to recite it with the tears pouring down 
her cheeks, so poignantly affected was she by the 
sensitive beauty of it. Her father also used to weep 
hopelessly — also her mother, if she happened to be 
near j and Heinrich, the cat, invariably retreated under 
the sofa, unutterably moved. 

Life dragged on with some monotony for Gretchen. 
She often used to help her mother in the kitchen — 
and occasionally in the sitting-room. One day she 
became a woman! Every one noticed it. Neigh- 
bours used to meet her mother in the strasse and say, 
" Frau Schmidt, your Gretchen is a woman." Frau 
Schmidt would nod proudly and reply, " Yes, we 
have seen thatj my Peter and I — we are very 
happy." Thus Gretchen left her girlhood behind 
her. It was her habit, so Grundelheim tells us, 
to walk out in the forest with one Hans Breitel, 
an actor at the municipal theatre. He used to teach 
her to talk to the birds, and when she besought him 
ardently to tell her stories of the theatre, he would re- 



104 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

late to her the parts he had nearly played. Gretchen's 
heart thrilled — oh to be an actress, an actress ! On 
her twenty-fourth birthday von Bottiburgen ^ tells us, 
Gretchen left home, and went to Berlin. She wanted 
to get an interview with Goethe. One day, after she 
had been in Berlin a little while, she found him. 
Brampenrich describes the scene for us, so beautifully 
and with such truly exquisite rotundity of style : — 

" The Great Goethe ate at his lunch. What was 
that noise? He swiftly put down his knife: the door 
bursts openj Gretchen Schmidt enters, her lovely hair 
awry, her cheeks flushed. ' I will act ! ' she cries in 
bell-like tones. ' Achy ach! ' cries Goethe. Then 
Gretchen, with a superb gesture, hangs her hat on the 
door handle, and recites to the amazed man his 
beloved ^ Faust,' word for word, syllable for syllable! " 

Thus Brampenrich shows us, with his supreme word 
imagery, what really happened. 

Gretchen never saw Goethe again j he left Berlin 

^ Von Bottiburgen, science master at the Munich College, 
author and compiler of the following: — "Our Women"; "Do 
Actresses Mind Much? "; "Life of Fritz Schnotter." 



Furs tin Lieherwurst zu Schweinen-Kalber 105 

almost immediately for the Black Forest. Gretchen, 
alone in the great capital, alone and a woman, what 
could she do? Grundelheim, in his celebrated " Toilers 
who have Toiled," relates how desperately hard she 
worked with her mangle in the Konigstrasse. Then 
one day, when things seemed at their blackest, Ro^ 
mance, with its multi-coloured finger, poked a hole 
in the bubble of her existence. The King of Prussia 
drove along the Konigstrasse, bowing to right and left. 
Gretchen stepped lightly over her mangle and dropped 
a curtsey. The King was immediately captivated, and 
a few hours later the happy girl found herself in the 
Royal Palace. After that events moved rapidly. At 
the lax German Court Gretchen soon forgot her aus- 
tere upbringing, and entered into the round games 
and charades with untold abandon! Alas! the fickle 
heart of the King was soon turned from her. Realis- 
ing this Gretchen seized upon a noble much enamoured 
of her, Furst Lieberwurst zu Schweinen-Kalber, and 
married him one spring morning in the Chapel Royal. 
For three months they lived together in the Austrian 



I06 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

Tyrol J then Gretchen, heeding at last the persistent 
call of her art, left him, and fled back to Berlin, where 
she obtained an engagement to play Juliet. It was 
from that moment that her real passion for her part 
developed. It grew to be an obsession — she was 
feted, lauded, mentioned in several public speeches. 
For sixty-five years she played it all oiver Germany, 
never tiring, never weakening. People gibbered over 
her J then came her tragic death at the age of ninety- 
two in the balcony scene. She stumbled forward, 
Grundelheim says, then backward, then forward, then 
backward again, and then forward for the last time. 
The balcony gave way, and she fell at Romeo's feet 
(it was the great Fritz Schnotter, with whom she had 
been playing for two years: in private life he was, of 
course, her lover — she always insisted on that). 

History tells us that he caught her in his arms — 
Bottiburgen contests that he caught her in the middle 
of his chest J anyhow, the house is said to have risen 
and cheered, thinking it was a new scene suddenly in- 
terpolated. Then the curtain slowly fell, and they 



Furs tin Lieberwurst zu Schweinen-Kalber 107 

realised the truth — they would never see their 
idolised Gretchen again. 

In passing, it would perhaps be as well to mention 
some of the famous Romeos who played opposite this 
bewitcher of all sexes. There was Reginald Bug, a 
young Englishman, who loved her passionately for a 
few years J then the renowned Pierre Dentifrice from 
the Comedie Frangaise^ then Angelo Carlini, and 
Basto Caballero (founder of the Shakespearean Theatre 
in Barcelona) j then Dimitri Chuggski, a very tempera- 
mental, highly strung Russian (it is in Volume viii. of 
Edgar Sheepmeadow's " Beds and their Inmates " 
that he relates the story of Chuggski's desertion of 
Gretchen 3 he contends that he left her because she al- 
ways slept with her mouth open). 

Her last and most famous lover on and off the stage 
was the aforementioned Fritz Schnotterj he is treated 
lavishly in three volumes of Bottiburgen. 

Her portrait on page 1 00 is a reproduction of Grob- 
meyer's etching. The original could formerly be 
viewed, I believe, by applying to the Kaiser for permis- 
sion and paying 1 8,000 marks. 



JAKE D'ANNUNZIO SPOUT 




JAKE D'ANNUNZIO SPOUT, World-Famed Writer 



JAKE D'ANNUNZIO SPOUT 

WHY is it that to some are vouchsafed such 
supreme gifts while other have perforce to 
drag out their lives in the hideous monotony of offices 
and banks and the like? 

Jake D'Annunzio Spout — even he, Jake the glori- 
ous — Spout the magnificent — commenced his career 
behind the counter of a delicatessen on Ninth Avenue 
— and now — his name and glory have waved across 
America like a pennon of victory. I do not intend as 
others have done to describe every small detail of his 
early life ^ — I merely wish with a few brief and 
decided strokes of the pen to expose to the public his 
mastery of psychology, his exquisite grace of style 
and above all his amazing supremacy of grammar. No 
writer since Steve Montespan Pligger has achieved such 

^ For example, " Spout the Man," 3 vols. — Richard Floopj 
" Jake the Climber," 7 vols. — Sholto Z. Hosper. 



lit 



112 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

stupendous feats of literature and even he — Pligger 
— failed over his well-remembered attack on an 
English Duchess, " The Fall of a Bloated Aristo- 
crat." According to contemporary criticisms it appears 
that through lack of familiarity with his subject he 
was unable to make her bloated enough — which was 
a pity as the main bulk of the book was intensely inter- 
esting, but Pligger, great as he undoubtedly was, 
could never aspire to the heights of Spout. Many 
people on reading Spout's first volume of poems in 
prose " Autumn in my Garden " were heard to say 
with a shake of the head, " Pligger's sun has set, we are 
at the Dawn of a new Era — the Spout Era! " Per- 
haps the greatest factor in Spout's greatness is his amaz- 
ing versatility. No one reading " Marie of China- 
town " ior the first time would believe the author cap- 
able of " Across the Sound for a Wife " ! The real- 
istic sordidity of the former balanced against the 
breathless adventure of the latter, combine in stamping 
Spout as a genius of the highest order. 

The three books he wrote while still working in the 



Jake D*Annunzio Spout 113 

delicatessen store are indelibly stamped with the pathos 
of his environment — " Thoughts in Vinegar," a 
bitter satire on bohemianism — " Three Little Pickles," 
an autobiography of the Barrymores as children and 
" The lonely Anchovy," a whimsical fantasy which if 
we are to believe Town Topics made Sir James Barrie 
quite furious. 

The story of the sudden recognition of Jake D' 
Annunzio Spout's genius by the more advanced literary 
coterie of New York City, etc., is widely known but 
too charming to leave unmentioned. He was, so we 
are told, seated on an upturned wooden box behind a 
pile of cheeses, sunk in a reverie, when suddenly the 
door opened and three men came into the store. 

" We wish to see Jake D'Annunzio Spout," said the 
foremost with a rich Harvard accent. 

Jake rose shyly, knocking a Camembert to the 
ground in his embarrassment. " I am he," he said 
blushing. 

A grey-haired man sniffed and waved his hand com- 
prehensively. " You must leave these sordid surround- 



114 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

ings," he said in a beautifully modulated voice in which 
a bad cold and a Yale intonation struggled for preced- 
ence, " and come with us." 

" Where to? " cried Jake clutching a salami sausage 
with boyish excitement. 

All three men doffed their hats. 

" To the Coffee House," they said reverently. 

" At this point," says Earl Hank in his exquisite 
study, * Spout Through and Through,' tears of ecstasy 
gushed down the boy's cheeks. * At last,' he cried in 
a choked voice and swooned. 

The three men gathered him up tenderly and car- 
ried him out towards the Elevated — " 

Of course the salient feature of Hank's study of 
Spout is the deep love and affection for his subject 
which permeates every page. Nobody but a true 
enthusiast and lover of beauty could ever have been 
so inspired. It was not until reaching the intellectu- 
ally austere atmosphere of the Coffee House that Spout 
regained consciouness: he opened his eyes wearily, but 
the light of dazzled amazement replaced fatigue when 



Jake D^Annunzio Spout ii$ 

he beheld the company that surrounded him — every 
man's face seemed to be stamped indelibly with the 
ineflFaceable mark of artistic achievement. Spout rose 
in happy, awed wonderment. 

Hands were stretched forth to him in welcome and 
friendship — one of the younger members gave vent 
to a furtive cheer but was instantly suppressed. Lunch, 
we are told, was to the newly-discovered poet a long 
dream of ecstasy, with the exception of one incident 
which, though somewhat painful, it is necessary to 
retail in order to illustrate what havoc habit can work 
on even the brightest psychologies. Earl Bowles (a 
descendant of Senator Didcot Bowles — beloved by 
all) in his rather wordy dissertation on " Intellects of 
the Hour " presents to us perhaps the most vivid picture 
of the scene. 

" Harvey Pricklebott, for several years editor of 
* Art in the Home,' leant forward to the dazed Spout 
and requested him to pass a plate of cold tongue which 
was lying near. With businesslike alacrity Spout did 
so — and then before anyone could prevent it — 



Ii6 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

detached from his belt a delicatessen payment check for 
25 cents and pushed it across the table. 

" There was a dreadful silence — Spout realising his 
appalling error endeavoured to pass it off by humming 
the Jewel Song from Faust. For a moment his 
nonchalance amazed everyone then as though a veil 
had been suddenly snatched from their eyes they gave 
a great cry: * This is Spout ! What Humour! What 
Roguery! Spout the Brilliant! ' " 

After this serio-comic contretemps every remark 
Spout made was hailed by all as a gem of super- 
lative wit. 

From the moment of his entrance into the Coffee 
House, Spout's career was assured — encouraged by his 
amazing success in a milieu to which many aspired but 
few attained, he at once wrote about it, probably his 
most world-famed novel, " The Continuous Fall of 
Harriet Ramsbotham.'' To say that this daring attack 
upon existing social conditions caused a sensation is to 
put the case mildly — it was a positive literary tour de 
force. Take for example the extraordinarily vital pas- 



Jake D^Annunzio Spout 117 

sage in volume two — when Harriet is insulted by 
Donald at a soda fountain, or the sordidly realistic 
moment in volume three when she is horsewhipped by 
Frederick on Long Beach — and above all perhaps those 
few tense seconds in volume one when Norman having 
lured her to Childs' for supper brands her left thigh 
with a flat-iron. Immediately upon publication of this 
masterpiece Spout received five hundred and ninety- 
four letters from anxious mothers, eight hundred 
and two requests for sexual advice from oppressed 
governesses and several threatening telegrams from 
the police. 

The ordinary everyday novelist would at once have 
become bombastic and conceited at being the cause of 
such a universal upheaval — not so Spout. He retired 
quite quietly to his cosy kitchenette apartment in Har- 
lem and wrote that charming and winsome essay in 
sentiment " Mollie's Holiday " — which in due course 
he followed with his celebrated treatise on reincarnation 
" A Drop of Blood " and " To Horse, to Horse " a 
stirring romance of the Civil War. 



Ii8 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

I will not seek with convincing falsehoods and un- 
scrupulous sophistry to hide the fact that Jake D^ An- 
nunzio Spout was never quite a gentleman. Others 
have endeavoured to do this and to my mind it is not 
only degrading but quite unworthy of the man's genius 
to dwell on such paltry failings as bad table manners, 
slight personal uncleanliness and the like. Many of 
the greatest men in the world have bitten their nails, 
and if we are to believe contemporary biographers, even 
the gloriously verbose Carlyle was known to expecto- 
rate frequently and with the utmost abandon while 
writing his world-famed fantasy " The French Revo- 
lution." 

Jake Spout was perhaps twenty-six when he met H. 
Mackenzie Kump the philanthropic millionaire whose 
intimate study " Spout, as I Knew Him " met with such 
a brilliant success last year. Kump it was who cajoled 
and eventually almost by force persuaded Jake to make 
a tour of the world. Kump it was who nursed him 
devotedly through malaria in Mombasa, dysentery in 
Delhi, hernia in Hong Kong, cramp in Cape Town and 



Jake D^Annunzio Sfout 119 

acute earache in Edinburgh, and who soothed his bed- 
side with almost womanly tenderness during his fearful 
outbreak of varicose veins in Vancouver. The work 
Spout accomplished in spite of slightly adverse circum- 
stances while abroad was quite stupendous and had it 
not been for his tragic marriage would doubtless have 
been published with alacrity and read by millions. It 
was presumably the will of an unkind fate that he 
should be pursued and eventually captured by Esme 
Chaddle — a woman not only without scruples of any 
description but possessing a revoltingly ugly face and 
the temper of a fiend. It was on their honeymoon 
that she became suddenly cross at breakfast and burnt 
all the unpublished MSS. that she could find in the 
back yard, thereby destroying heartlessly the luscious 
fruits of untold labour while abroad. Spout with the 
contradictory stubbornness characteristic of so many 
geniuses continued — though very hurt — to adore 
his vixenish wife with the blind concentrated passion 
which for so many years had impregnated his work and 
now, alas, was running to waste on such an unyielding 



120 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

desert. His literary friends and admirers one and all 
shook their heads sadly, perceiving reluctantly that 
the end was in sight. For two years Spout wrote 
nothing but three short articles/ then as though some 
premonition of impending disaster touched with flam- 
ing wings the sleeping carcase of his talent he sat down 
and wrote his soul-searching national appeal " Hist." 
This he completed on his thirty-first birthday. 

For a true and sincere description of that last tragic 
night we must turn to Richard Floop — whose 
love for Spout has lent his pen so much glamour 
and poetry. 

** Dusk was falling when Jake stole softly out 
through the scullery door and clambered on the char- 
a-banc for Coney Island. On arrival at that home of 
gaiety and irresponsibility he forgot his troubles — 
his sordid domestic upheavals — even his talent he 
suppressed and merged himself like an ordinary human 
being into the mad spirit of carnival. With boyish 

^ " Fruit as a Decoration," " With Shaggy Four Legged Play- 
mates " and " Bhuddism as Opposed to Electricity." 



Jake D^Annunzio Spout 121 

shouts he rolled on the joy-wheel j with childish 
gurgles he bestrode strange and jolting painted horses 
and waved his hat daringly when the merry-go-round 
was at its fastest. His excitement on the helter-skelter 
knew no bounds — while his delighted screams in the 
river caves called forth many appreciative raspberries 
from the friendly crowds. With no presentiment 
that this evening of unadulterated ecstasy was to be the 
culminating and final sensation in his eventful life he 
stepped into that fatal compartment on the big wheel 
— from which a quarter of an hour later he hurtled 
when at an enormous height from the ground! " 

There ends Floop's beautiful and heart-breaking 
picture of the death of a great and wonderful man. 
Some say it was suicide — others that he was merely 
leaning out too far in admiration of the view. Who 
knows what really inspired that sudden fierce rush to 
death? But whatever the cause there is one fact that 
remains — shining like a star above the squalid wreck 
of his latter years — he died happy. The indisputable 
proof of this can be obtained from perusal of the first 



122 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

line of a poem which was discovered in his breast 
pocket: 

" All Hail to Fun and Merriment — " 

The less widely-known works of Jake D'Annunzio 
Spout are as follows: 

" Sun-dappled Dreams," a book of poems. 
*' Through Bavaria with a Note-book." 
" The Sin of Pharoah Bubster." 

and: 

"With Lincoln in Calcutta," a Fantasy. 

Fountain-pen pieces and ever-sharp pencil in col- 
lection of H. Mackenzie Kump. 



DONNA ISABELLA ANGELICA Y 

BANANAS 




DONNA ISABELLA ANGELICA Y BANANAS 
Trom the 'portrait by Baloona {early Spanish) 



DONNA ISABELLA ANGELICA Y 

BANANAS 

OPAIN has ever been the home of romance and 
^^ beauty and fiery passion, but never in its whole 
history has it bred such a tremulously beautiful love 
story as that of Donna Isabella Angelica y Bananas. 
A romance of two passionate hearts in such a vivid 
setting cannot but fail to make the eye kindle and 
the pulses throb. Compared to it, Lancelot and Elaine 
become cardboard puppets, Dante and Beatrice figures 
of clay utterly devoid of life, while Paolo and Fran- 
cesca appear merely idiotic. 

Picture to yourself, if you will, the Spain of the 
Middle Ages; if you can't, it doesn't matter. Isabella 
Angelica was born at Seville in 1582, the daughter of 
Don Juan de Cabarajal and Maria his wife. Don Juan 
owned the Castella del Hurtado, having been left it 
by his Infamous but regal uncle, Don Lopez a Basastos. 

I2S 



126 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

The Castello lay surrounded in the foreground by 
turrets and moats, in the middle distance by orange 
groves and extraordinarily verdant meadows j while 
in the background the majestic Pyrenees, rearing their 
snowy peaks in serried ranks of symmetrical splendour, 
imparted to the whole thing the semblance of rugged 
grandeur which is the birthright of every true Spaniard. 
Isabella Angelica's childhood dawned and waned in 
these exquisite surroundings: she would play with her 
tutors various games, some of them traditional, such 
as " catch orange " and " raralaray" ^ and now and then 
frolics of her own invention, for history tells us she 
was ever a merry little trickster. It was not until she 
was seventeen that the true radiance of her beauty 
became apparent. Her mother had been wiser to 
guard the child more closely than she did, for do we 
not read in Dr. Polata's " From Girl to Woman " that 
between the ages of nineteen and twenty she was con- 
stantly seen mounting the Pyrenees in a daring fashion 
and entirely unattended? But still, doubtless owing to 

^ Spanish equivalent to " tag " or " he." 



Donna Isabella Angelica y Bananas iiy 

her charming nature, which was a sweet composition 
of mischief and kindliness, she remained unspoilt by 
this undesirable contact with a rude world which should, 
until her marriage, have been outside her girlish ken. 

When she reached the age of twenty — " the very 
threshold of womanhood," as Fernando Lope so beau- 
tifully puts it — she was betrothed to Pedro y Bananas, 
a noble fresh from the vice and debauchery of the 
Court at Valladolid. Knowing naught of love or 
passion, she consented without hesitation, being but a 
tool in the hands of her parents, and a few months later 
the wedding took place with enormous pomp in the 
Cathedral at Seville. 

After the ceremony the bride and bridegroom 
repaired to the Palazza Bananas, the country seat of 
Pedro, who, though poor himself, had had many costly 
estates handed down to him. 

Here, so report tells us, after subjecting Isabella 
Angelica for three years to the vilest insults and utmost 
cruelty, Pedro left her temporarily and returned to 
the Court, now at Castille. Poor Isabella Angelica! 



128 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

This was the gay world she had dreamed of — 
the ecstatic life she had hoped and fully expected to 
live! 

Then suddenly with the departure of her husband, 
she found peace — peace in the rocky solitudes, in the 
scented gardens and rolling foothills j and here this 
poor, lonely woman found fulfilment of all her 
maiden dreams — " Love ! " 

No one knows the authentic story of her first meet- 
ing with Enrique Baloona. Some say he was fishing 
for bolawallas ^ and she came graciously up and asked 
him the timej others aver that he was passing beneath 
her lattice and she dropped a fluted hair-tidy at his feet. 
But anyhow, from the time they first met they never 
parted until it was absolutely necessary. They pursued 
the course of their love through the long, tranquil 
summer days and nights — every word they uttered 
one to the other was sheer poetry. Enrique, who was 
a fully qualified academician, painted the portrait 
reproduced on page 124. It is alas! the only one in 
^ Bolawalla — Spanish equivalent for " mullet." 



Donna Isabella Angelica y Bananas 129 

existence, all the others having been destroyed by the 
Inquisition. 

But alack! as is the way with all beauty, it is but 
short-lived. The end of their peaceful passion came 
with the announcement of Pedro's return from the 
Court, now at Aragon. Isabella Angelica, history 
relates, was beside herself with misery. Enrique also 
was considerably upset. Together the doomed couple 
arranged a plan of escape. They flew together to the 
Villa Morla, a notorious abode of illicit lovers. It was 
here that the enraged Pedro caught up with them and 
killed Enrique with a look. Isabella Angelica was then 
taken against her will to join the Court. At last at 
Madrid. For two years, Dr. Polata tells us, her heart 
was numb with anguish j then gradually the life at 
Court, still at Madrid, began to take effect on her 
malleable character. She became intensely viciou-s: 
much of the sweetness portrayed in Enrique's portrait 
vanished, leaving her expression cross and occasionally 
even sullen. All the world knows of her meeting with 
the Infanta, so we will not dwell upon it. One day her 



130 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

husband died unexpectedly. Cruel-minded courtiers 
suspected Isabella Angelica, but she was so obviously 
crushed that their suspicions were allayed. Her heart 
exulted — she had killed him with a poisoned pen- 
wiper. No one knew. Poor Isabella Angelica! Her 
tragic love affair had indeed transformed her from the 
appealing girl of yesterday to the recklessly unhappy 
woman of to-day, forced on to the path of cruelty and 
vice by unlooked-for circumstances. She performed 
this deed and that with almost mechanical diabolicismj 
some say she knew not one day from another. In 1597 
she was offered an exceedingly good position by the 
Inquisition, which she immediately accepted. It was, 
she felt, her only chance of happiness — to have the 
opportunity of inventing a few good tortures would 
comfort her J and why not? People of to-day, narrow 
and unsympathetic, may censure her as being spiteful 
and unkind, but in those days things were — oh, so 
different! 

She sent for her little brother and had him burnt j 
this eased the pain at her heart a little. Then her aunt 



Donna Isabella Angelica y Bananas 131 

was conveyed to her from Majorca, and on arrival was 
pierced by several bodkins and ultimately buried in hot 
tar. Isabella Angelica almost gave vent to a wan smile. 

She supervised her father's death, the actual work 
being performed by her colleagues of the Inquisition. 
He was cut in moderate-sized snippets and toasted on 
one side only. 

It says much for Isabella Angelica's charm and 
personality that the populace, in spite of their knowl- 
edge of her deeds, one and all adored her — to the end 
of her life the unstinting love and adulation of all 
who came in contact with her was hers irretrievably. 

It was during the personal mutilation of her third 
cousin that she caught the influenza cold which cost her 
her life. Poor, doomed Isabella Angelica: her death- 
bed was surrounded by heart-broken mourners who had 
flocked from all parts of sunny Spain to pay tribute to 
the dying beauty 3 the Inquisition issued an edict that 
no eyes were to be put out for a whole week in honour 
of her. 

She died peacefully, clasping an ivory rosary and a 



132 Terribly Inthnate Portraits 

faded miniature on elephant's hide, portraying a 
handsome, debonair young man. Could it have been 
Enrique Baloona? 

Thus lived and died one of Spain's most entrancing 
specimens of feminine beauty. 



MAGGIE McWHISTLE 



r~ 







o 
■^ 



c< 



U <i 



bo 



O I, 
o 



MAGGIE McWHISTLE 

BORN in an obscure Scotch manse of Jacobite 
parents, Maggie McWhistle goes down to 
immortality as perhaps the greatest heroine of Scottish 
history J and perhaps not. We read of her austere 
Gallic beauty in every record and tome of the period — 
one of the noble women whose paths were lit for them 
from birth by Destiny^s relentless lamp. What did 
Maggie know of the part she was to play in the history 
of her country? Nothing. She lived through her 
girlhood unheeding j she helped her mother with the 
baps and her father with the haggis j occasionally she 
would be given a new plaidie — she who might have 
had baps, haggis, and plaidies ten thousandfold for the 
asking. A word must be said of her parents. Her 
father, Jaimie, known all along Deeside as Handsome 
Jaimie — how the light-hearted village girls mourned 

135 



136 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

when he turned minister: he was high, high above them. 
Of his meeting with Janey McToddle, the Pride of 
Bonny Donside, very little is written. Some say that 
they met in a snowstorm on Ben Lomond, where she 
was tending her kinej others say that they met on the 
high road to Aberdeen and his collie Jeannie bit 
her collie Jock — thus cementing a friendship that 
was later on to ripen into more and more — and 
even Maggie. Some years later they were wed, and 
Jaimie led his girl-bride to the little manse which was 
destined to be the birthplace of one of Scotland's 
saviours. History tells us little of Maggie McWhistle's 
childhood: she apparently lived and breathed like any 
more ordinary girl — her griddle cakes were famous 
adown the length and breadth of Aberdeen. Gradually 
a little path came to be worn between the manse and 
the kirk, seven miles away, where Maggie's feet so 
often trod their way to their devotions. She was 
intensely religious. 

One day a stranger came to Aberdeen. He had 
braw, braw red knees and bonnie, bonnie red hair. 



Maggie McWhistle 137 

History tells us that on first seeing Maggie in her 
plaidie he smiled, and that the second time he saw her 
he guffawed, so light-hearted was he. 

One day he called at the manse, chucked Maggie 
under the chin, and ate one of her baps. Eight years 
later he came again, and, after tweaking her nose, ate 
a little haggis. By then something seemed to have 
told her that he was her hero. 

One dark night, so the story runs, there came a 
hammering on the door. Maggie leapt out of her 
truckle, and wrapping the plaidie round her, for she 
was a modest girl, she ran to the window. 

" Wha is there? " she cried in Scotch. 

The answer came back through the darkness, thrill- 
ing her to the marrow: 

" Bonnie Prince Charlie! " 

Maggie gave a cry, and, running down-stairs, opened 
the door and let him in. She looked at him in the 
light shed by her homely candle. His brow was amuck 
with sweat: he was trembling in every limbj his ears 
were scarlet. 



138 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

" What has happened? " 

" I am pursued," he replied, hoarse with exertion 
and weariness. " Hide me, bonnie lassie, hide me, 
hide me! " 

Quick as thought, Maggie hid him behind the door, 
and not a moment too soon. Then she displayed that 
strength of will and courage which was to stamp her 
as a heroine for all time. There came a fresh hammer- 
ing on the door. Maggie opened it defiantly, and 
never flinched at the sight of so many brawny menj 
she only wrapped her plaidie more tightly round her. 

" We want Bonnie Prince Charlie," said the leader, 
in Scotch. 

Then came Maggie's well-known answer, also in 
Scotch. 

" Know you not that this is a manse? " 

History has it that the man fell back as though" 
struck, and one by one, awed by the still purity of the 
white-faced girl, the legions departed into the night 
whence they had come. Thus Maggie McWhistle 
proved herself the saviour of Bonnie Prince Charlie 
for the first time. 



Maggie McWhistle 139 

There were many occasions after that in which 
she was able to prove herself a heroine for his sake. 
She would conceal him up the chimney or in the oven 
at the slightest provocation. Soon there were no trees 
for thirty miles round in which she had not hidden him 
at some period or another.^ 

Poor Maggie — perchance she is finding in heaven 
the peaceful rest which was so lacking in her life on 
earth. For legend hath it that she never had two 
consecutive nights' sleep for fifteen years, so busy was 
she saving Bonnie Prince Charlie. 

Then came that great deed which even now finds 
an exultant echo in the heart of every true Scotsman — 
that deed which none but a bonnie, hardy Highland 
lassie could have got away with. . . . You all know 
of the massing of James' troops at Carlisle, and later 
at Glasgow, and later still at Aberdeen. Poor Prince 
Charlie — so sonsie and braw, a fugitive in his own 
land — he fled to Loch Morich, followed by Maggie 

^ Bloodworthy says: " It was her fond boast that she never hid 
him in the same tree twice." 



140 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

McWhistle in her plaidie, carrying some haggis and 
baps to comfort him in his exile. History is rather 
hazy as to exactly what happened j but anyhow, Maggie, 
with the tattered banner of her country fast unfurling 
in her heart, decided to save her hero for the last timej 
and it was well she did not tarry longer, for he was 
sore pressed. History relates that two tears fell from 
his eyes on to the shore.^ Then Maggie, with a brave 
smile, handed him a bap. 

" Eat," she said in Scotch ; " you are probably very 
hungry." 

These simple words, spoken straight from her heart, 
had the eflFect, so chroniclers inform us, of pulling him 
together a bit. 

"Where can I hide? " he asked. 

Maggie looked at him fearlessly for a moment. 

" You shall hide in a tree," she cried, with sudden 
inspiration. 

^ Bloodworthy, in telling the story, says that only one tear 
fell; but Bloodworthy, brilliant recorder as he was, was occa' 
sionally prejudiced. 



Maggie McWhistle 141 

Bonnie Prince Charlie fell on his braw red knees. 

" Please," he cried pleadingly, " could it be an elm? 
Pm so tired of gnarled oaks." 

"Yes!" cried the courageous girl exultantly. 
" Quick, we will trick them yet." 

Then came the supreme moment — the act of sheer 
devotion that was to brand that simple soul through 
the ages as a noble martyr in, alas! a lost cause. Shading 
her eyes with her hand, she perceived a legion of the 
enemy encamped on the one island of which the lonely 
Gallic loch boasted. Her woman's wit had devised a 
plan. Flinging baps and haggis to the winds, she leapt 
into a boat and began to row — you all know the story 
of that fateful row. Round and round the island she 
went for three weeks,^ never heeding her tired arms 
and weary hands 5 blisters came and went, but she 
felt them notj her hat flew off, but the lion-hearted 
woman never stopped j ~ and all to convince the troops 

^ The reproduction on page 134 from the celebrated picture by 
Gerphipps — in oils at the National Gallery, in water colour at the 
Tate Gallery, and in Paripan at the Edinburgh Art Museum. 

^ The picture represents Maggie at the end of the second week. 



142 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

on the island that it was a fleet approaching under the 
command of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Completely 
routed, every officer and man swam to the mainland 
and beat a retreat, and not until the last of them had 
gone did Maggie relinquish her hold on the creaking 
oars. 

Thus did the strategy of a simple Highland lassie 
defeat the aims of generals whose hearts and souls had 
been steeped from birth in the sanguinary ways of war. 
Of her journey home with the Prince you all knowj 
and what her white-haired father said when she arrived 
you've heard hundreds of times. There has been a 
lot of argument as to the exact form the Prince's 
gratitude took. Some say he unwrapped her plaidie 
and went away with itj others write that he cut a lock 
of his braw red hair and gave it to her with his usual 
merry smile j but the authentic version of that moving 
scene is that of the burnt scone. Maggie had baked 
a scone and handed it to himj then, after he had bitten 
it, he handed it back. 

" Nay, lassie, nay," he is said to have remarked. 



Maggie McWhistle 143 

" My purse is empty but my heart is full. Take this 
scone imprinted by my royal teeth, and treasure it." 

Then with a debonair bow and a ready laugh, a 
mocking shout and whimsical wink, he went out into 
dreary Galway — a homeless wanderer. 

Of Maggie's death very little is known. Some say 
she died of hay-fever j others say it was nasal catarrh j 
but only her old mother, . with a woman's unerring 
instinct, guessed the truth: in reality she died of a 
broken heart and a burnt scone. 



THE EDUCATION OF RUPERT PLINGE 




RUPERT PLINGE, Aged g Months and 4 Years, 
Respectively 



THE EDUCATION OF RUPERT PLINGE 

UNDER the blue-grey shadow of the Didcot 
Bowles bungalow, with beech trees and pussy 
willows fringing the banks of the river Sippe which 
runs, or ran before it was dammed, down past old Caesar 
Earwhacker's bicycle shed, three miles from the vil- 
lage of Sagrada, Conn., to the West and eight miles 
from Roosefelt under the hill to the North leaving 
the South free for a Black Rising and the East for the 
Civil Warj — there in the seventeenth cottage, with 
green shutters, below the bridge — with the pine cones 
occasionally tap-tapping against the pantry window — 
owing to a strange combination of circumstances Rupert 
Plinge's elder sister first saw the light of day. Rupert 
himself being born ten months later at Guffle Hoe. 

Had he been born on the lower reaches of the Yukon 
and baptised by a remittance man in a Wesleyan Chapel, 

147 



148 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

he would probably not have suffered so acutely from 
the cold as he did at Guffle Hoe, nor could he 
have been more persistently victimised and handi- 
capped in after life by bronchial asthma and pyor- 
rhoea of the gums. 

Though coldness for a baby was unpleasant in 1 8 70 
it was infinitely more tiresome in 1592 and perfectly 
devastating in 1306. But GufBe Hoe — try to reflect 
if possible the troglodytic fun of being born within 
earshot and eyeshot of people such as Granville Boo, 
General Udby, Ex-President Sumplethock, Senator 
Mills-Tweeper and Harriet Beecher Stowej and places 
such as Mount Knitting, Mudlake West, Pigeon Park 
and Appleblossom Villa. These influential factors 
combined were undoubtedly the foundations of the 
enormous mathematical ability which became apparent 
long before the boy attained the age of three, but un- 
fortunately for the level development of his mentality, 
the repulsive plainness of Senator Mills-Tweeper 
coupled with the innate idiocy of General Udby, com- 
pletely overshadowed the girlish charm of Harriet 



The Education of Rupert Plinge 149 

Beecher Stowe. Had Rupert been consulted would he 
have liked playing the game at all — holding the cards 
in the wrong hand as he did from the very start without 
the slightest conception of what the game really was 
and why they were playing it? But it is quite obvious 
now to anyone looking back over the years that had 
the cards of his life been shuffled by his Auntie Gracie 
before her elopement to the Klondyke with Ex-Senator 
Fortescue, the ultimate stakes would have been im- 
measurably dissimilar. At this time the harsh political 
spirit of Guffle Hoe was morally if not physically and 
perhaps mentally inflamed by the appearance of several 
tramp steamers in the mouth of the Sippe, a new hay- 
cart at Oozeworthy Farm, and the flashing of the 
electrifying news across the newly erected telegraph 
wires that Peter Rotepillar and Henry Plugg had, 
apart from their dramatic refusal to enter themselves 
as candidates for the Presidency, declined to take any 
further interest in politics at all and had set up a 
flourishing bee nursery in Bokewood, Mass. This was 
on a Friday. Rupert was two months old and naturally 



150 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

sensitive — living and sometimes breathing in such a 
political atmosphere — to the far-reaching eflFects of 
such a shattering blow to the constituency. Of all this 
that was being performed to complicate his education he 
became suddenly conscious of an innate sense of the 
roundness of the whole universe. He began to find 
himself continually oppressed by the protuberant near- 
ness and corresponding magnitude of his mother's 
face, which grafted itself upon his infant psychology by 
looming with maddening regularity over his cot and 
consciousness. The peculiar rotundity of this good 
woman's countenance seemed to illustrate to the rising 
sun of his genius the ethics of that science at which — 
had he but lived seventy years later — he might have 
become so famous : — Geography. 

On September 9th, 1 871, he developed croup, which 
in due course promoted him to one of the first steps 
of artistic education — Colour. 

For several days he hung between life and death, 
turning an exquisite shade of purple and black as each 
new coughing fit seized him. This not unusual phe- 



The Education of Rwpert Plinge 151 

nomenon impressed its vivid seal upon the plastic wax 
of his unfledged memories with extraordinary pre- 
cision. In after life, for a long while, he was quite 
unable to gaze at an ordinary muscat grape or a coal- 
scuttle without either biting his comforter right through 
or being extremely sick. Naturally this disability 
coupled with the physical weakness and sense of impo- 
tence that he invariably experienced when in the com- 
pany of his older companions occasioned him much 
unhappinessj in fact, many of the intense sorrows of 
his childhood were caused by the thoughtless mockery 
of his sister Leah Clara, aged nineteen months. 

To the uninitiated spectator it would appear when 
gazing casually at young Rupert Plinge that the psy- 
chologically educational environment surrounding him 
was deeply impregnated with the spirit of political 
reformation which, though neither Elizabethan in tone 
nor strictly Cromwellian in atmosphere, was strongly 
suggestive to the lay mind of the Second Empire. The 
subconscious force of this abstract influence went far 
toward moulding the delicate shoots of his rapidly 



152 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

developing mentality into a brilliant knowledge of 
weights and measures, decimals, and the native popu- 
lation of Borneo. 

Whether Rupert was enjoying his rubber comforter 
on the cool green grass, or on the slightly painful 
gravel, or on the fiercely hot asphalt, summer was to 
him a season of unsurpassed sensuality, flooding his 
character with rich productive thought and a passionate 
adoration for his great-aunt Maud, who was wont to 
beguile the long sun-stained hours by lying amid 
cushions among the foliage, humming " The Star- 
Spangled Banner," while she removed with the point 
of her nail-scissors caramels and other adhesive morsels 
from the gutta-percha plate of her new false teeth 
which lay in her lap. 

With an amazing clarity of perception which, though 
generally supposed to be inherited from his great- 
uncle Miles, for fifty-four years Unitarian minister 
in the Red Lamp district of Honolulu, would undoubt- 
edly in the searching light of twentieth century vision 
be mainly attributed to prenatal influences and astro- 



The Education of Rupert PUnge 153 

nomical premonitions, he realised that the atmosphere 
was exceedingly chilly in the winter. 

Later biographists have exposed with somewhat 
malicious emphasis the one weak point in an otherwise 
magnificently constructed intelligence — to wit, the 
peculiar inability to recognise the inner psychology and 
spiritual determination of his great-grandfather — 
Bobbie Plinge — who as all the world knows met a 
tragic death at the hands of Great Brown Spratt, the 
last but one of the Mohicans, some fifteen years before 
the birth of Rupert himself. This deficiency in one of 
the greatest of all American characters was in a measure 
remedied by his excessive appreciation of his grand- 
father O'Callaghan Soddle's luxurious house in Boob 
Street, later on when the abode of stupendous intel- 
lect had been completely gutted by fire and soaked in 
water. The boy Rupert, then aged two years and a 
fortnight, exercised a fiercely dominant influence upon 
the ground charts, plans, etc., for the new palatial 
residence which was soon to rear its mighty pillars and 
porticos not so very far from the ivy-grown cottage 



154 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

which in the past had on several occasions sheltered 
the wistful personality of Harriet Beecher Stowe. 

The inherent passion for beauty thus crystallized in 
the mellowing virility of the boy's finely wrought tem- 
perament went far toward satisfying his deep-rooted 
and well-nigh insatiable yearning for city splendour. 

In the strange juxtaposition to his unequalled com- 
prehension of national political problems was a sur- 
prising streak of frank insouciance and happy-hearted 
boyishness, which frequently expressed itself in the 
open defiance of authority in the shape of his great- 
aunt Maud, his slightly dropsical mother (nee Sheila 
Soddle) and his two resident cousins, Alexander 
Chaffinch and Dorothy Bonk, who at moments were 
entirely unable even to bend the finely tempered steel 
of his inflexible will, therefore on the one occasion when 
his decisive plans were unexpectedly frustrated an im- 
pression was photographed with extraordinary bas- 
relief upon his mind of the omnipotence of his quite 
infirm Grandfather Soddle — and of power as a con- 
crete argument. The incident being the removal of a 



The Education of Rupert PUnge 155 

half-sucked tin soldier from his hand by the subtle 
device of striking his knuckles sharply with the fire 
tongs. Then and always the boy insisted that this 
method of reprimand justified his apparent submission; 
the emptiness of his hand and the smarting of his 
knuckles indubitably marking probably the only occa- 
sion in his life when all his strategical points abruptly 
turned inward. Contrary to the suppositions of im- 
partial psychologists, far from breeding the slightest 
resentment against old Mr. Soddle, this occurrence 
inspired an active dislike to great-aunt Maud who had 
indulged in her ever-irritating laugh at his expense. 
He expressed his natural anger by filling her handker- 
chief-case with bacon fat, and other boyish revenges 
of a like nature. 

A child whose soaring entity had been nourished and 
over tended in such an exotic forcing house of accum- 
ulated endeavour and democratic emancipation must 
indubitably have been the first to realise that the auster- 
ity of his massive intellect was within measurable dis- 
tance of completing that predestined cycle of universal 



156 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

knowledge and aspiring ultimately to the glorious pin- 
nacle of political achievement. 

Rupert Plinge's fourth birthday had scarce dawned 
across the hills of time when the long drawn out shadow 
of earthly obscurity completely enveloped the brightest 
flower of nineteenth century America. The almost 
morbid cultivation of his superluminary brain reached 
its devastating climax while committing to memory the 
anatomy of the common grub in order to demonstrate 
to the Eastern constituency the fundamental principles 
of fiscal autonomy. Lying in his cot, his large pale 
eyes fixed grimly on a visionary goal, he realised with 
an intuitive pang that the hour of dismissal was at hand. 
Calling his mother to him he asked his last illumi- 
nating question, his mind groping still in search of 
truth's flaming beacon: 

" Mother, why am I dying? " 

Mrs. Plinge leant over him and whispered impress- 
ively, " You are dying of dropsy caused by over- 
education! " And turning on her heel she went slowly 
out of the room. 



The Education of Rupert Plinge 157 

Delirium entered the darkening nursery. Rupert, 
clasping his hot-water bottle raptly, murmured dream- 
ily as he merged into the Great Unknown, the crystal- 
lisation of the subconscious influence which had perme- 
ated his whole career — 

" Dropsy, Dropsy, 
Topsy, Topsy — 
Harriet Beecher Stowe." 



ANNA PODD 




ANNA PODD 
Trom a very old Russian oleografh 



ANNA PODD 

THOUGH of humble origin, though poor and 
unblessed with any of life's luxuries, Anna Podd 
made her way in the world with unfaltering determi- 
nation. The tragedy of her life was perhaps her 
ambition, but who could blame her for wishing to better 
herself? She had nothing — nothing but her beauty. 
What a woman's beauty can do for herself and her 
country is amply portrayed in the kaleidoscopic pageant 
of Anna Podd's life. The only existing picture of her 
(here reproduced) was discovered in Moscow after 
Ivan Buminoff's well-remembered siege, lasting seven- 
teen years. Poor Anna! Destiny seemed ruthlessly 
determined to lead her so far and no further. A Tsar 
loved her, which is more than falls to the lot of some 
women, yet fate's unrelenting finger was forever placed 
upon the pulse of her career. 

i6i 



1 62 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

Of her parents nothing is known. We first hear of 
her in a low cabaret in St. Petersburg West. All night, 
so Serge Tadski tells us in " Russian Realism," it was 
her sordid duty to flaunt that exquisite loveliness which 
Heaven had bestowed upon her before the devouring 
eyes of every sort and description of Russian man. She 
was wont to sway rhythmically and sinuously to the 
crazy band which played for herj now and then, with 
pain in her heart and a merry laugh on her lips, she 
would leap onto the tables and snap her fingers indis- 
criminately. 

Often it was her duty to drink ofF glass after glass 
of champagne J but she never became inebriated.^ 
Her purpose in life was too set — she meant to break 
away. In Nicholas Klick's " Life of Anna Podd " he 
states that she met the Tsar at a ball, whence she was 
hired professionally. This statement is entirely un- 
true j and I am more than surprised that such a talented 
man as Klick should have made such a grievous error. 

^ Except on one occasion. For particulars, see Boris Brattle- 
vitch's " Women of Russia." 



Anna Podd 163 

It has been absolutely impossible to unearth the true 
story of her meeting with the Tsar. 

It was after their meeting that the real progress of 
her career commenced. Her Royal master established 
her in the palace as serving-maid to the ailing Tsarina, 
a generous but somewhat tactless act on his part. 
Somehow or other, history whispers, Anna fell foul of 
the Tsarina — they simply hated one another. Occa- 
sionally the Tsarina would throw hot water over Anna 
for sheer spite. Poor Anna, her beauty was alike her 
joy and her terror. The Tsarina, Klick informs us, was 
somewhat plain, and knew it — hence her distaste for 
the dazzling Anna. 

One day, the Tsarina died — no one knew why. 
Anna, guileless and innocent enough, was at once 
suspected by all as having poisoned her, except the Tsar, 
who, to avert further suspicion, promptly created her 
Duchess of Poddoff . This mark of royal esteem had the 
effect of quieting the people for a while at least. Life 
went on much as usual at the Royal Palace. Anna was 
kept in close seclusion for safety's sake. The Tsar 



164 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

loved her with a steady, burning devotion which caused 
him to have all his children by the Tsarina rechristened 
" Anna," indiscriminately of sex. 

One day a messenger arrived in blue and yellow 
uniform ^ to bid the Tsar gird himself for war. When 
the luckless Anna heard the news, she was with her 
women (all ladies of title): some say she swooned j 
others aver that she merely sat down rather suddenly. 
Fate had indeed dealt her a smashing blow. Once her 
Imperial lover left her side she would at once be taken 
prisoner and flung God knows where. This she knew 
instinctively, intuitively. Klick describes for us her 
dramatic scene with the Tsar. 

" He was just retiring to bed," he writes, " prepar- 
atory to making an early start the next morning, when 
the door burst open, and Anna, tear-stained and sob- 
bing, threw herself into the room and, hurling herself 
to the bed, flung herself at his feet, which, owing to 
his immensity of stature, were protruding slightly over 
the end of the mattress. * Take me with you! ' she 

^ According to Mettlethorp's " Asiatic Soldiery," Vol, VII. 



Anna Podd 165 

cried repeatedly. ' No, no, no! ' replied the Tsar, 
equally repeatedly. At length, worn out by her plead- 
ing, the poor woman fell asleep. It was dawn when the 
Tsar, stepping over her recumbent form, bade her a 
silent good-bye and went out to face unknown horror. 
Half an hour later Anna was flung into a dungeon, pre- 
ceding her long and tiring journey to Siberia." 

Thus Klick describes for us the pulsating horror of 
perhaps one of the most pitiful nights in Russian 
history. 

In those days the journey to Siberia was infinitely 
more wearisome than it is now. Poor Anna! She was 
conveyed so far in a litter, and so far in a sleigh, and 
when the prancing dogs grew tired she had perforce 
to walk. Heaven indeed have pity on those unfortu- 
nate women from whom the eye of an Emperor has 
been removed. 

For thirty long years Anna slaved in Siberia. She 
drew water from the well, swept the floor of the crazy 
dwelling wherein she lived, lit the fire, and polished 
the samovar when necessary. In her heart the bird 



1 66 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

of hope occasionally fluttered a draggled wing: would 
he send for her — would he? If only the war were 
ended! But no! Rumours came of fierce fighting 
near Itchbanhar, where the troops of General Codski 
were quartered. It was, of course, the winter following 
the fearful siege of Mootch. According to Brattlevitch 
in Volume ii. of " War and Why," the General had 
arranged three battalions in a " f rat " or large semi- 
circle, in the comparative shelter of a " boz " or low- 
lying hill, in order to cover the stealthy advance of 
several minor divisions who were thus able to execute 
a miraculous " yombott " or flank movement, so as to 
gain the temporary vantage ground of an adjacent 
" bluggard " or coppice. All this, of course, though 
having nothing material to do with the life of Anna 
Podd, goes to show the reader what a serious crisis 
Russia was going through at the time. 

It was fifteen years after peace was declared that 
the Tsar sent a messenger to Siberia commanding 
Anna's immediate release and return, and also confer- 
ring upon her the time-honoured title of Podski. Anna 



Anna Podd 167 

was hysterical with joy, and filled herself a flask of 
vodka against the journey home. Poor Anna — she 
was destined never to see St. Petersburg again. 

It was while they were changing sleighs at a way- 
side inn that she was attacked by a " mipwip " or white 
wolf/ which consumed quite a lot of the hapless woman 
before anyone noticed. 

Brattlevitch tells us that the Tsar was utterly dazed 
by this cruel bereavement. He had Anna's remains 
embalmed with great pomp and buried in a public park, 
where they were subsequently dug up by frenzied an- 
archists.^ He also conferred upon her in death the 
deeds and title of Poddioskovitch, thus proving how a 
poor cabaret girl rose to be one of the greatest ladies in 
the land. 

^ See Tadskl's " Natural Mammals of the Steppes." 
^ During the celebrated rising in 1682. 



SOPHIE, UNCROWNED QUEEN OF 
HENRY VIII 



■•■^■■•^■••■Ti 




SOPHIE 

From an old frint 



SOPHIE, UNCROWNED QUEEN OF 
HENRY VIII 

CONTEMPORARY history tell us little of 
Sophie, later chronicles tell us still less, while 
the present-day historians know nothing whatever 
about her. It is only owing to concentrated research 
and indomitable patience that we have succeeded in 
unearthing a few facts which will serve to distinguish 
her from that noble band of unknown heroines who 
have lived, paid the price, and died, unnoted and 
unsung ! 

She was born at Esher. The name of her parents it 
has been impossible to discover, and as to what part of 
Esher she first inhabited we are also hopelessly 
undecided. 

As a child some say she was merry and playful, 
while others describe her as solemn and morose. The 

171 



172 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

reproduction on page 170 is from an old print dis- 
covered by some ardent antiquaries hanging upside 
down in a disused wharf at Wapping. 

It was obviously achieved when she was somewhere 
between the ages of twenty and forty. The unknown 
artist has caught the fleeting look of ineffable sadness, 
as though she entertained some inward premonition of 
her destiny and her spirit was rebelling dumbly against 
what was inevitable. 

Esher in those days was but a tiny hamlet — a few 
houses clustered here, and a few more clustered 
there. London, then a graceful city set upon a hill, 
could be seen on a clear day from the northernmost 
point of Esher. On anything but a clear day it was, 
of course, impossible to see it at all. Esher is now, and 
always has been, remarkable for its foliage. In those 
days, when the spring touched the earth with its joyous 
wand, all the trees round and about the village blos- 
somed forth into a mass of green. The river wound 
its way through verdant meadows and pastures. In 
winter-time — providing that the frost was very strong 



Sophie y Uncrowned Queen of Henry VIII 173 

— It would become covered in ice, thus forming a 
charming contrast to early spring and late autumn, 
when the rain was wont to transform it into a swirling 
torrent, which often, so historians tell us, rose so high 
that it overflowed its banks and caused much alarm to 
the inhabitants of Esher proper. We do not use the 
expression " Esher proper " from any prudish reason, 
but merely because Little Esher, a mile down the road, 
might in the reader's mind become a factor to promote 
muddle if we did not take care to indicate clearly its 
close proximity. 

Esher, owing to its remarkable superabundance of 
trees, was in summertime famous for its delightful 
variety of birds: magpies, jackdaws, thrushes and wag- 
tails, in addition to the usual sparrows and tom-tits, 
were seen frequently j occasionally a lark or a starling 
would charm the villagers with its song. 

The soil of Esher, contrary to the usual supposition, 
was not as fertile as one could have wished. Often, 
unless planted at exactly the right time, fruit and vege- 
tables would refuse to grow at all. The main road 



174 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

through Esher proper, passing later through Little 
Esher, was much used by those desiring to reach Ports- 
mouth or Swanage or any of the Hampshire resorts. 
Of course, travellers wishing to visit Cromer or 
Southend or even Felixstowe would naturally leave 
London by another route entirely. 

Dick Turpin was frequently seen tearing through 
Esher, with his face muffled, and a large hat and a 
long cloak, riding a horse, at night — there was no 
mistaking him. 

According to Sophie's diary, written by her every 
day with unfailing regularity for thirty-five years, she 
always just missed seeing Dick Turpin. This was 
apparently a source of great grief to herj often she 
would pause by the roadside and weep gently at 
the thought of him. Poor Sophie! One was to ride 
along that very road who was destined to mean 
much more to her than bold Dick Turpin. But we 
anticipate. 

It was perhaps early autumn that saw Esher at its 
best — how brown everything was, and yet, in some 



Sofhiey Uncrowned Queen of Henry VIII 175 

cases, how yellow! As a hunting centre it was very 
little used, though occasionally a stag or wild boar 
would, like Dick Turpin, pass through it. 

One evening, when the trees were soughing in the 
wind and the sun had sunk to rest, Sophie went out with 
her basket. It was too late to buy anything, but she 
felt the need of airj not that the basket was necessary 
in order to obtain this, but somehow she felt she 
couldn't bear to be without it, such a habit had it 
become. The darkness was rapidly drawing in. 
Sophie paused and spoke to a frog she saw in a puddle j 
it didn't answer, so she passed on. 

Suddenly she heard from the direction of London 
the sound of hoofs! ^* Dick Turpin! " her heart cried, 
and she at once commenced to climb an elm the better 
to see him passj but it was not Dick Turpin — it was a 
shorter man with a beard. On seeing the intrepid girl, 
he reined in his roan chestnut-spotted filly. " Hi ! " 
he cried. Sophie slowly climbed down. " Who are 
you? " she asked, after she had dusted the bark from 
her fichu. " Henry the Eighth ! " cried the man with 



176 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

a ready laugh, and, leaping oflF his charger, took her 
in his arms. " Oh, sire ! " she said, and would have 
swooned but that his strength upheld her. History 
tells us little about that interview. Suffice to say that 
later on Sophie walked gravely back to Esher proper, 
alas! without her basket, but carrying proudly in her 
hand a brooch cunningly wrought into the shape of a 
raspberry. 

It is known as an authentic fact that Sophie never 
saw her Royal lover again. He rode away that night, 
perhaps to Woking, perhaps to Virginia Water — who 
knows? 

Sophie lived on in Esher until the age of thirty-nine, 
when she was taken to London and flung into the 
Tower, where she remained a closely guarded prisoner 
for a year. Every one loved her and used to visit her 
in her cell. She was exceedingly industrious, and 
managed to get through quite a lot of tatting during her 
captivity. 

The day of her execution dawned fair over St. Paul's 
Cathedral. Sophie in her little cell rose early and 



Sophie, Uncrowned Queen of Henry VIII 177 

turned her fichu. " Why do you do that? " asked the 
gaoler. " Because I am going to meet my end," Sophie 
gently replied. The man staggered dumbly away, 
fighting down the lump which would come in his hard- 
ened throat. 

When the time came Sophie left her cell with a 
light step. She walked to Tower Hill amidst a body 
of Beefeaters. " The way is long," she said bravely. 
Every Beefeater bowed his head. 

There was a dense crowd round the scaffold. Sophie 
heeded them notj she ran girlishly up the steps to 
where the executioner was leaning on his axe. " Where 
do I put my head? " she asked simply. The execu- 
tioner pointed to the block. " There ! " said he. 
" Where did you think you put it? " Sophie reproved 
him with a look and knelt down. Then she gazed 
sweetly at the gaoler, who for a year had stinted her in 
everything. " The past is buried," she said sweetly. 
" To you I bequeath my tatting! " With these chari- 
table words still hovering on her lips, she laid her head 
upon the fatal blockj from that trying position she 



178 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

threw the executioner a dumb look. " Do your 
duty, my friend," she said, and shut her eyes and her 
mouth. 

Mastering his emotion with an effort, the heads- 
man raised his axej through a mist of tears, it fell. 



"LA BIBI" 




"LA BIBI" 
From the fastel by Coddle 



"LA BIBI" 

HORTENSE POISSONS — "La Bibi." What 
memories that name conjures up! The incom- 
parable — the lightsome — the eflFervescent — her life 
a rose-coloured smear across the history of France — 
her smile — tier upon tier of sparkling teeth — her 
heart, that delicate organ for which kings fought in 
the streets like common dukes — but enough j let us 
trace her to her obscure parentage. You all know the 
Place de la Concorde — she was not born there. You 
have all visited the Champs Elysees — she was not 
born there. And there's probably no one who doesn't 
know of the Faubourg St. Honore — but she was not 
born there. Sufficient to say that she was born. Her 
mother, poor, honest, gauche^ an unpretentious seam- 
stress; she seamed and seamed until her death in 1682 
or 1683: Bibi, at the age of ten, flung on to the world 

181 



1 82 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

homeless, motherless, with nothing but her amazing 
beauty between her and starvation or worse. Who can 
blame her for what she did — who can question or 
condemn her motives? She was alone. Then Armand 
Brochet (who shall be nameless) entered the panorama 
of her career. What was she to do — refuse the roof 
he ojBFered her? This waif (later on to be the glory of 
France), this leaf blown hither and thither by the winds 
of Destiny — what was she to do? Enough that 
she did. 

Paris, a city of seething vice and corruption — her 
home, the place wherein she danced her first catoucha, 
that catoucha which was so soon to be followed by her 
famous Japanese schottische, and later still by her 
celebrated Peruvian minuet. Voltaire wrote a lot, but 
he didn't mention herj Jean Jacques Rousseau scrib- 
bled hours, but never so much as referred to herj even 
Moliere was so reticent on the subject of her un- 
doubted charms that no single word about her can be 
found in any of his works.^ 

^ For full reference, see Dulwich Library — ' buses Nos. 48 
and 75 and L.C.C. trams j change at Camberwell Green. 



''La Bibi'* 183 

Her life with Armand Brochet (who shall still be 
nameless) three years before she stepped on to the 
boards — how well we all know it ! Her famous epi- 
gram at the breakfast table : " Armand, my friend, this 
tgg is not only soft — but damn soft." How that 
remark convulsed Europe! 

Her first appearance on the stage was in Paris, 1690, 
at the Opera. Bovine writes of her: " This airy, 
fairy thing danced into our hearts j her movements 
are those of a gossamer gadfly — she is the embodi- 
ment of spring, summer, autumn and winter." By this 
one can clearly see that in a trice she had Paris at her 
feet — and what feet ! Pierre Dugaz, the celebrated 
chiropodist, describes them for us. " They were ordi- 
nary flesh colour," he tells us, " with blue veins, and 
toe-nails which, had they not been cut in time, would 
have grown several yards long and thus interfered 
with her dancing." 

What a sidelight on her character! — gay, bohe- 
mian, care-free as a child, not even heeding her feet, 
her means of livelihood. Oh, Bibi — " Bibi Coeur 



184 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

d'Or," as she was called so frequently by her multi- 
tudinous adorers — would that in these mundane days 
you could revisit us with your girlish laugh and supple 
dancing form! Look at the portrait of her, painted 
by Coddle at the height of her amazing beauty: note 
the sensitive nostrils, the delicate little mouth, and 
those eyes — the gayest, merriest eyes that ever 
charmed a king's heart j and her hair — that "mass 
of waving corn," as Bloodworthy describes it in his 
celebrated book of " International Beauties." But we 
must follow her through her wonderful life — 
destined, if not to alter the whole history of France, 
why not? 

After her appearance in Paris she journeyed to 
Vienna, where she met Herman Veigel: you all know 
the story of that meeting, so I will not enlarge upon it 
— enough that they met. It was, of course, before he 
wrote his " Ode to an Unknown Flower " and " My 
Gretchen has Large Flat Ears," poems which were 
destined to live almost forever. Bibi left Vienna and 
journeyed to London — London, so cold and grim 



''La Bibi" 185 

after Paris the Gay and Vienna the Wicked. In her 
letter to Madame Perrier she says, " My dear — 
London's awful "j and " Ludgate Circus — I ask 
you! " But still, despite her dislike of the city itself, 
she stayed for eight years, her whole being warmed 
by the love and adulation of the populace. She ap- 
peared in the ballet after the opera. "Her dancing," 
writes Follygob, " is unbelievable, incredible j she takes 
one completely by surprise — her butterfly dance was 
a revelation." This from Follygob. Then Henry 
Pidd wrote of her, " She is a woman." This from 
H. Pidd! 

Then back to Paris — home, the place of her birth. 
Fresh conquests. In November, 1701, she introduced 
her world-famed Bavarian fandango, which literally 
took Paris by storm — it was in her dressing'-room 
afterward that she made her celebrated remark to 
Maria Pippello (her only rival). Maria came ostensi- 
bly to congratulate her on her success, but in reality to 
insult her. " Ma petite " she said, sneering, " Phibou 
est-il sur le hate? " Quick as thought Bibi turned 



1 86 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

round and replied with a gay toss of her curls, " Nofiy 
mais fat la plume de tna tantel " Oh, witty, sharp- 
tongued Bibi! A word must be said of the glorious 
ballets she originated which charmed France for nearly 
thirty years. There were " Life of a Rain Drop," 
" Hope Triumphant," and " Angels Visiting Ruined 
Monastery at Night." This last was an amazing 
creation for one so uneducated and uncultured as La 
Jolie Bibi J people flocked to the Opera again and again 
in order to see it and applaud the ravishing originator. 
Then came her meeting with the King in his private 
box. We are told she curtsied low, and, glancing up at 
him coyly from between her bent knees, gave forth her 
world-renowned epigram, " Comment va, Pafa? " 
Louis was charmed by this exquisite exhibition of 
drollery and diableriey and three weeks later she was 
brought to dance at Versailles. This was a triumph 
indeed — La Belle Bibi was certainly not one to miss 
opportunities. A month later she found herself in- 
stalled at Court — the King's Right Hand. Then 
began that amazing reign of hers — short lived, but 



"La Bibi'' 187 

oh, how triumphant, dukes, duchesses, countesses, even 
princes, paying homage at the feet of La Bibi the 
dancer, now Hortense, Duchesse de Mal-Moulle! 
Did she abuse her power? Some say she did, some say 
she didn't j some say she might have, some say she 
might not havej but there is no denying that her beauty 
and gaiety won every heart that was brought into con- 
tact with her. Every afternoon regularly Louis was 
wont to visit her by the private staircase to her apart- 
ments j together they would pore over the maps and 
campaigns of war drawn up and submitted by the 
various generals. Then when Louis was weary Bibi 
would put the maps in the drawer, draw his head onto 
her breast, and sing to him songs of her youth, in the 
attractive cracked voice that was the bequest of her 
mother who used to sing daily whilst she seamed and 
seamed. Meanwhile, intrigue was placing its evil 
fingers upon the strings of her fate. Lampoons were 
launched against her, pasquinades were written of herj 
when she went out driving, fruit and vegetables were 
often hurled at her. Thus were the fickle hearts of the 



1 88 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

people she loved turned against their Bibi by the 
poisonous tongues of those jealous courtiers who so 
ardently sought her downfall. 

You all know the pitiful story of her fall from 
favour — how the King, enraged by the stories he had 
heard of her, came to her room just as she was going 
to bed. 

" You've got to go," he said. 

" Why? " she answered. 

History writes that this ingenuous remark so un- 
manned him that his eyes filled with tears, and he 
dashed from the room, closing the door after him 
in order that her appealing eyes might not cause him 
to deflect from his purpose. 

Poor Bibi — your rose path has come to an end, 
your day is nearly done. Back to Paris, back to the 
squalor and dirt of your early life. Bibi, now in her 
forty-seventh year, with the memories of her recent 
splendours still in her heart, decided to return to the 
stage, to the public who had loved and feted her. 
Alas! she had returned too late. Something was 



''La Bibi" 189 

missing — the audience laughed every time she came 
on, and applauded her only when she went o£F. Oh, 
Bibi, Bibi Coeur d'Or, even now in this cold age our 
hearts ache for you. Volauvent writes in the Journal 
of the period: "Bibi can dance no longer." Veaux 
caps it by saying " She never could," while S. Kayrille, 
well known for his wit and kindly humour, reviewed 
her in the Berlin Gazette of the period by remarking, 
in his customarily brilliant manner, " She is very plain 
and no longer in her first youth." This subtle criticism 
of her dancing, though convulsing the Teutonic capital, 
was in reality the cause of her leaving the stage and 
retiring with her one maid to a small house in Mont- 
martre, where history has it she petered out the last 
years of her eventful career. 

Absinthe was her one consolation, together with a 
miniature of Louis in full regalia. Who is this hag- 
gard wretch with still the vestiges of her wondrous 
beauty discernible in her perfectly moulded features? 
— not La Belle Bibi ! Oh, Fate — Destiny — how 
cruel are you who guided her straying feet through 



190 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

the mazes of life! Why could she not have died at 
her zenith — when her portrait was painted? 

But still her gay humour was with her to the end. 
As she lay on her crazy bed, surrounded by priests, 
she made the supreme and crowning bon mot of her 
brilliant life. Stretching out her wasted arm to the 
nearly empty absinthe bottle by her bed, she made a 
slightly resentful moue and murmured " Encore unel ^' 

Oh, brave, witty Bibi! 



AH! AH! 
QUEEN OF THE RUDE ISLANDS 




AH! AH! Queen oe the Rude Islands 



AH! AH! 
QUEEN OF THE RUDE ISLANDS 

THE "Rude" Islands! what a thrill that name 
awakes in the heart of every wanderer — lying 
as they do in the very heart of the rolling Pacific. Was 
it two or three hundred years ago that brave Joshua 
Mortlake discovered and christened them? History 
has it that he was standing on the poop deck of his 
schooner the " Whoops-a-Daisy " when he first beheld 
those pocket Paradises of the Pacific. He shaded his 
eyes with his hand and turned to his bosom friend — 
Eagle Trott: 

" What exactly do those islands remind you of? " 
he asked. 

Eagle looked down bashfully. " Pd rather not say," 
he replied. 

At this Joshua slapped him heartily on the back. 

193 



194 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

" Stap me," he cried, using a colloquialism of the 
period, " if I do not name them the Rude Islands." 
And from that moment they have been known as 
nothing else. 

To attempt to describe the wild untameable beauty 
of the coast scenery would be almost as absurd as to 
endeavour to portray the seductive sensuality and exotic 
perfection of the interior landscapes — but a brief 
catalogue of some of the outstanding horticultural 
marvels will do no harm to anyone and perhaps convey 
to the lay mind a slight conception of the atmosphere 
in which Ah! Ah! was born and bred. For instance, 
the flowering kaia-ooh! with its exquisite perfume 
(suggestive of the Calif ornian Poppy), the veemua- 
wees (a small hard fruit suggestive of the oak apple), 
and the perennial "Pooh! " (merely suggestive) all 
combined to enwrap the infant Ah! Ah! in a somno- 
lent cocoon of sensual languidness, from which in 
after life she was hard put to it to escape. To say that 
her dazzling beauty completely hypnotised any native 
for miles round into instant submission — would per- 



Ah I Ah I Queen of the Rude Islands 195 

haps be exaggerating j but if one is to judge from the 
accounts of contemporary chroniclers she was undoubt- 
edly attractive. 

For those interested in queer native traditions and 
legends, the origin of her name must indeed prove 
an instructive object lesson — intermingling as it does 
the austerity and reproach of the North with the quaint 
domestic charm of the further South. The story runs 
thus: 

When quite a child this lithe supple young thing was 
as full of mischief and engaging roguery as any tor- 
toiseshell kitten — with elfin glee her favourite sport 
was to fill her grandmother's bed with " ouliaries " 
(Good God! berries, so called because on sudden con- 
tact with bare flesh they burst with a loud explosion 
causing the victim to shout " Good God ! " from sheer 
surprise). For three months this winsome game went 
undetected until one day her mother — Kia-oopoo — 
discovered her creeping in at her grandmother's door 
with a basket full of " ouliaries." Catching her 
daughter by the scruff of the neck she proceeded to 



196 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

administer several sharp slaps with great precision — 
the while murmuring " Ah ! Ah " in tones of rebuke. 
And thus, we are informed, was originated a name that 
was destined to be handed down to every reigning queen 
of the Rude Islands until the devastating tidal wave of 
1889. 

Ah! Ah!'s childhood was spent running completely 
wild with her three sisters " Beaoui " (meaning 
" Heavens Above ")? " Sua-sua " (meaning " Shut your 
Face ") and young " Goop " (meaning in American 
"Park your Fanny" and in English, "Sit Down"). 

Through the long languid sunny hours they would 
romp in the " lovieeah " (long grass), or play " uou " 
(toss the cocoa-nut) in the " haeeiuol " (short grass). 
On moonlight nights when the tide was high they 
would fish from the reef — catching generally either 
" youis " (the Pacific haddock) or merely the common 
" choop " (or dab). Life was one long round of sport 
and play — until one day — to quote Hans Burdle in 
his world-famed book of Travel, " Set Sail ahoy " " the 
radiant Ah! Ah! awoke and found herself to be a 



Ah I Ah I Queen of the Rude Islands 197 

woman — with a woman's joys, a woman's sorrows 
and withal the touch of a woman's hand." 

From that moment life in the Rude Islands became 
a different matter. No more was she to paddle in the 
" ku-ku " (small stream or rivulet) or chase the playful 
" erieuah " (or hooped snake, which when pursued by 
its enemies executes the most peculiar antics eventually 
disappearing amid a cloud of smoke). The responsi- 
bilities of a greater existence were suddenly thrust upon 
her — she was crowned queen. 

The story of the unexpected arrival of a Presby- 
terian missionery in the midst of her coronation feast 
is too well known to repeat — and the tale of the land- 
ing of eight Bhuddist monks during the christening of 
her first child is now so hackneyed as to be irritating j 
therefore we will skip the minor incidents of the early 
part of her reign and mention a few of the progressive 
improvements on existing conditions which found their 
source in her tireless and fertile brain. 

To begin with she abolished the *' plozza " (or 
notched club), substituting in its place the " sneep " (a 



198 Terribly Intimate Portraits 

subtle instrument of torture which by means of the 
sudden expenditure of the breath would cover one's 
enemies with " noonies " (or red ants). 

Then, though flying in the face of time-honoured 
tradition, the courageous woman completely forbade 
cannibalism among blood relations j condemning this 
practice under the heading of " gavonah " (or incestu- 
ous conduct) and thereby putting an end to many rowdy 
Sunday evenings. 

Not content with these vast changes in the funda- 
mental Island habits she concentrated her unfailing 
energies on the reformation of the marriage laws, which 
at that time were in a deplorably decadent condition, 
and encouraged with all her might the trade of 
" fuahs " and " aeious " (nose rings and hair tidies) 
with the " Bauoacha " Islands a few miles off. Until 
the ripe age of eighty-seven she ruled her subjects 
trustingly and lovingly — yet withal firmly — earning 
for herself from all the British traders the nickname of 
" Queen Bess of the Pacific." 

After her death her eldest illegitimate son, Boo-aH 



Ah I Ah I Queen of the Rude Islands 199 

(Goodness Gracious) ascended the throne, and — if 
we are to believe Professor Furch's " With Dusky 
Friends " — went far towards undoing the unbeliev- 
able good worked by his unflinching mother. 

I have included Ah! Ah! in these memoirs — in 
the face of almost overwhelming opposition (mainly 
on account of race prejudice) in the first place because 
she was as beautiful and authoritative as any of the 
European queens — and secondly because Ah ! Ah ! 
for me stands for something ineffably noble, inspiring 
— not perhaps for what she has done — maybe more 
for the things she left undone. 



GLOSSARY 



GLOSSARY 

Baloona, E.NRIQUE. Artist and dilettante^ famous for his 
" Portrait of Isabella Angelica," " Spanish Peaks," and " Half- 
Caste Child with Orange." 

Ben-Heppi.e, Nicholas. Eighteenth century historian. 
Author of " Julie de Poopinac " (17 vols.). 

Bloodworthy, Stephen. Author of " International Beauties," 
" Then and Now," and " Now and Then." 

BoGTOE, Douglas. Company promoter and basket-work expert. 

Bonk, Dorothy. First cousin to Rupert Plinge — incidentally 
the first New England girl to say " Gosh! " 

Boo, A. Ranville. Celebrated XlXth century sanitary inspector. 

BoTTiBURGEN, Hans VON. Science master, Munich College. 
Author of " Our Women," " Do Actresses Mind Much? " and 
"Life of Fritz Schnotter " (3 vols.). 

Bottle, Elizabeth. Adapter and translator of several works 
of the period. 

Bovine, Gustave. Author of " French without Tears " and 
" Vive les Vacances," etc. 

203 



204 Glossary 

Bowles, Earl. " Intellects of the Hour," " Cheese Cookery 
in All Its Branches." 

Bramp, B. F. " America in Sunhine and Shadow," " Pinafore 
Days." 

Bramp, Norman. Author of " Up and Away," " Reynard, the 
Story of a Fox," " Tantivoy," and " Female Influence and Why? " 
(5 vols.). 

Brampenrich, Fritz. German historian. 

Brattlevitch, Boris, Russian author. Books: " War and Why," 
" Women of Russia." Several good cooking recipes. 

Bug, Reginald. Actor — occasional property man. Parts he 
played: " Romeo," " Bottom," " Third Guest " in " The Berlin 
Girl," " Norman " In " Oh, Charles — a Satire on the Massacre 
of Saint Bartholomew," and others. Hobbies: Cup-and-ball, tilting, 
and fretwork. 

BuRDLE, Hans. Bulgarian author; Works: "Set Sail Ahoy," 
" Abaft," " Belay," etc. 

Caballero, Basta. Actor and founder of Shakespearean 
Theatre In Barcelona. 

Campanele, ViTTORio. Florentine engraver, " Early Portrait 
of Blanca dl Planno-FortI," " Raised Pansles on China Plaque," etc. 

Campbell, Olaf. Keen angler and piscatorial expert. 



Glossary 205 

Carlini, Angelo. Italian actor — formerly plumber during 
the Renaissance. 

Chaddle, Esm6. Daughter of Avery Chaddle, and subsequently 
Mrs. J. D. Spout. 

Chaffinch, Alexander. Second cousin to Rupert Plingej 
second man to say " Gee! " in Virginia. 

Chuggski, Dimitri. Russian actor. 

Coddle, Humphrey. Artist, well known for his " Cows 
Grazing outside Dover," " Playmates," and " Daddy's Darling." 

Cronk, Oswald, Bart. Painter of " Madcap Moll, Eighth 
Duchess of Wapping," " Pine Trees near Ascot," and " Esther 
Lollop as ' Cymbeline.' " 

Dentifrice, Pierre. Actor — French (early). 

DuGAZ, Pierre. Court chiropodist, seventeenth century. 
Author of " Feet and Fashion," " The Valley of Waving 
Corns," etc. 

Earwhacker, Caesar. Owner of Old World Bicycle Shed. 

FiBiNio, Pietro. Italian — author of " Bianca," " God Bless 
the Pope," etc. 

Floop, Richard. "Spout, the Man" (3 vols.); "The Girls 
of Marley Manor " and " Janet's Prank." 



206 Glossary 

FoLLYCOB, Alan. English Dramatic Critic. Clubs: '* The 
Union Jack " and " The What-Ho " in Jermyn Street. 

FoRTEscuE, Ex-Senator. Celebrated for eloping with Rupert 
Plinge's Auntie Gracie. 

Frapple, Ernest.. "Amy Snurge, A Grand Woman" (2 vols) 
and a political satire, " Don't Vote Till Tuesday! " 

FuRCH, Professor. " With Dusky Friends " and " Where Palm 
Trees Sway." 

Gerphipps, Ronald. Very old Scotch painter — famous for 
" Portrait of Maggie McWhistle," " Evening on Loch Lomond," 
and " Glasgow, my Glasgow! " 

Goethe. Obscure German author. Suspected of having written 
" Faust." 

Goodge, Albert. Friend of Nicholas Kewee. 

Grobmayer, Carl. Early German etcher 

Grundelheim, Paul. German author and historian. Princi- 
pal works: " Toilers who have Toiled," " Women of Wurtemburg," 
and " Byways of the Black Forest." 

Hooter, Freddie. Renowned for physical appearance but 
flat feet. 

Hosper, Sholto Z. " Jake the Climber " (7 vols.) and " Diet 
or Die." 



Glossary 207 

Kayrille, Siegfried. Born in Berlin, 1670. Disappointed 
playwright, and subsequent art critic. 

Kewee, Nicholas. Friend of Albert Goodge. 

Klick, Nicholas. Russian — author of " Life of Anna Podd " 
(6 vols.), and " Was Ivan Terrible? " 

Kump, H. Mackenzie. Keen philanthropist and insatiable 
globe-trotter. 

Lincoln, Abraham. President and man. 

Mactweed, Sandy. Scotch actor of some note. 

Mary, Bloody. Queen of England. 

Mettlethorp, Rupert. Compiler of " Asiatic Soldiery " 
(23 vols.). 

Mills-Tweeper, Senator. Famed for hideousness, but kind- 
hearted and a great insect lover. 

Mortlake, Joshua. Explorer and discoverer of the Rude 
Islands. 

Pidd, Henry. Severe dramatic critic — English. 

Pipper, Herman. " Poor Puffwater, — A Brown Study." 

Pligger, Steve Montespan. " The Fall of a Bloated Aristo- 
crat," " Crab Apples," " Deadly Nightshade," " Don't Tell Aunt 
Hester," " Under the Moon, or Revels by a Dutch Canal," 



2o8 Glossary 

" America From Behind "; Books of Verse: " Adown the Ganges," 
"The First Primrose," "Pussy, Pussy, Lap Your Milk" and 
" Raspberry Time." 

Plinge, Bobbie. Killed during Red Indian foray by Great 
Brown Spratt. 

Plinge, Miles. Unitarian minister in Red Lamp District, 
Honolulu. 

Plugg, Henry. One time candidate for the Presidency, subse- 
quently successful bee-farmer. 

PoLATA, JosE. Professor — Spanish. Author of " From Girl 
to Woman," " Spanish Olives, and How," etc., etc. 

PoLioLioLi, Giuseppe. Author of " Women of Italy " and 
" Nelly of Naples," a musical comedy of the period. 

Pricklebott, Harvey. Editor of " Art in the Home " and 
"Mother Week by Week." 

Proon, Bernard. Well-known speaker, intimate friend of 
Roosevelt's brother-in-law. 

Pu.nter, AuGtrsTUS. Seventeenth century painter, famous for 
" Sarah, Lady Tunnell-Penge, with Dog," " Gravesend by Night," 
and various crayon portraits, notably " A Merry Girl " and " The 
Drowsy Sentry." 

Roosevelt, Theodore. Man and President. 



Glossary 209 

RoTEPiLLAR, Peter. Friend of Henry Plugg and author and 
compiler of "Algebra with Many a Laugh! " 

Rousseau, Jean Jacques. French writer of some note. See 
Carlyle's " French Revolution." 

ScHNOTTER, Fritz. German actor, sixteenth century. 

Sheepmeadow, Edgar. English writer — author of " Beds and 
their Inmates" (i8 vols.), "The Corn Chandler," "Women 
Large and Women Small " (lo vols.). 

SoDDLE, O'Callaghan. Gentleman architect of the XlXth 
century. 

Spratt, Great Brown. Indian of the period. 

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Author of " Uncle Tom's Cabin." 

Sumplethock, Ex-President. Spaniel trainer and " raconteur." 

Tadski, Serge. Early, fairly. Russian. Author and compiler 
of the following: " Russian Realism," " Natural Mammals of the 
Steppes," " Flora and Fauna of Siberia," etc., and light verse. 

Throtch, Esther. Well-known XXth century " literateur." 

Tossele, Yvonne, Mme. First female mezzotinter of the 
Revolutionary Era. 

Trott, Eagle. .Mate and pal of Joshua Mortlake. 

Turpin, Dick. Highwayman — English. Inventor of straw 
sun hats for hot horses. 



210 Glossary 

Udby, General. Congenital idiot of the XlXth century (and 
very mean). 

Veaux, Paul. Art critic — Paris. 

Veigel, Herman. German poet — famous for "Twilight 
Fancies," " There was a Garden," and " Collected Poems, includ- 
ing • The Ballad of Crazy Bertha.' " 

Volauvent, Armand. Art critic — Paris. 

Voltaire (Christian name unknown). Old writer — French. 

Waffle, Raymond. Georgian writer. Author of " Our Dogs," 
" Canine Cameos," and " Pretty Rover, the Story of a Boarhound." 

Weedhein, H. "Columbia, Beware! " (8 vols.). 



PRESS NOTICES 

Clagmouth Chronicle: "A book to be taken up and 
put down again." 

East Bromley Advertiser: "This is a book!" 

The Girls* Globe: "Every young girl should read this." 

Doctor Cheval in Advice to a Mother: "No bedside table 
is complete without 'Terribly Intimate Portraits.'" 

Joe Bogworih in Capital and Labour says: "This book 
is perhaps the greatest power for good or evil in 
democratic England or aristocratic America either, for 
that matter. Though obviously the work of a thinker, 
should it by any chance fall into the wrong hands it 
would go far towards undermining not only the League 
of Nations, but the London County Council to boot!" 

Aunt Hilda in Fireside Fun says: "Darling chicks, get 
your mumsie to buy you 'Terribly Intimate Portraits' 
for your birthday." 

Lady Minerva Stuff e in Undies writes: "Well-dressed 
women will eagerly peruse these fascinating memoirs." 

The Playing Field: "'Chaps'! Read this book." 

The Political Gazette: "Well done, Noel Coward! 
Bravo, Lorn Macnaughtan!" 

Herr von Groh in The Austrian Tyrol: "Gott in 
Himmel!'* 

Chicken Chat: "I advise keen poultry keepers to buy 
and read 'Terribly Intimate Portraits.'" 

211 



212 Press Notices 

Cri de Paris: "Ce llvre n'est pas seulement stuplde, 
mais c'est excessivement irritant, et absolument sans 
humeur." (Translation: "This book is not only 
charming, but it is excessively entertaining and 
brilliantly humorous.") 

Claybank Courier: "Once read — never forgotten." 

WiGAN World: "Splendid for those just learning to read." 

Boxing Weekly: "Dam' good!" 



WHAT THE AMERICAN PRESS MAY SAY: 

Vanity Fair: "A book for ladies and gentlemen." 

New York Times: "This book treats a delicate theme 
in the most indelicate fashion possible." 

The Dial: "The parabolics are unevenly balanced." 

George Jean Nathan: "Eugene O'Neill remains our only 
dramatist." 

Life: "Noel Coward's first and best book." 

Paper Trade Journal: "The sulphite used in the paper 
of 'Terribly Intimate Portraits' is of excellent quality." 

Judge: "Two hundred and twelve pages." 

Review of Reviews: "Some of it is better than the rest." 

The World: "H. the 3d says that this book makes better 
paper dolls than any he has read for a long time," 



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